Putin goes on to say
”Our proposal is not to freeze the conflict, like how the west wants it, but to end it. I repeat, this is not to freeze the conflict, but for its final completion.”
true, Russia could have elected Karl Marx or Jesus Christ or Taylor Swift as president and they would still have responded to american provocation in similar ways. Putin is a conservative, homophobic oligarch, but just about anyone else in that position would have responded similarly to the threat of NATO nukes on their border and nazis ethnically cleansing speakers of their language. If Mexico decided to join BRICS and host Chinese nukes and militias started massacring english-speakers and anyone with american citizenship or ancestry, we would go full Iraq Invasion style and turn the entire country into rubble and irradiated craters and corpses, meanwhile Russia waited like 2 years after invading to even start targeting the electrical grid and other infrastructure.
I’m not great at geography, so when I recently saw a map that showed how some of the Western missiles could reach Moscow from Ukrainian territory…that was when it really hit me how Ukraine potentially joining NATO is basically the Cuban missile crisis except much worse for Russia. Yeah, make fun of me all you want for not taking the time to really look at a map.
yea i’ve had people be like ‘we can hit them with nukes from anywhere why does ukraine matter’ but like having 20 or 30 minutes to detect an incoming ICBM from the ocean (to maybe shoot it down/knock it off course or get everyone into bunkers to launch your own counterattack) is a much better situation in terms of deterrence than having 5 minutes to maybe detect a launch from concealed/rough terrain and have just enough time to let everyone in the nuclear command center/capital city know they are going to die (missile nerds correct me if i’m oversimplifying, ICBMs at long range need to reach near-orbit heights in their flights whereas closer range missiles can be launched to fly somewhat closer to the ground in ways harder to detect with radar or intercept with missiles of your own)
