the_dunk_tank

Eh, personally I think that Russia would only launch the nukes if Ukraine were to start occupying large swathes of Russia (not including Crimea or the Donbas) and even then, I think things would have to go pretty far. If you think that Russia has been out of missiles since March (as libs do), it's not unreasonable to expect a victory where Ukraine recovers all the occupied territory.

Fucking exactly. Russia holds the ultimate card in this exchange. Backing Ukraine to the hilt just jeopardizes the entire world through a very clear act of complicity. The west is playing with fire like this is another Afghanistan. The Soviets were extremely reluctant to use nukes because they lost 27 million people in a brutal war of attrition. Russia in these days isn't the USSR. It is capitalist like the rest of them, and reckless about power like the rest of them. They finally got their peerage. God save us all.

the goal isn't for ukraine to win, the goal is for american military companies to profit off of the war and for american energy companies to profit off of the destruction of nordstream 2. they're willing to sacrifice ukraine and it's people for this while baiting them with false promises of inclusion in the imperial core. Also they wanted ukraine to have NATO membership since NATO membership allows america to build bases and station nukes much closer to moscow than previously. America simply uses the language of liberalism (human rights, westphalian sovereignty) to justify this imperialist expansion of NATO into the former soviet countries. A long term goal might also be the balkanization of Russia from internal pressure. If Russia keeps having to fight proxy wars against the USA (Afghanistan in the 80s, then syria, now ukraine, I forget whether Georgia and Chechnya were US proxy wars) then all that conscription and war spending will eventually cause societal collapse. If Russia is balkanized the way Yugoslavia was, the imperial core capitalists get to loot the entrails of the collapsed Russia and play the new balkanized regions of russia against each other. This would also cause russia's large nuclear arsenal to be split up amongst smaller states.