So it's either, Ukraine can't win, so don't support it or Ukraine might win and that's too dangerous due to Russia might use a nuke. Heads, Ukraine gets no support and tails the same policy choice. Here's why stalemate won't happen:
The best unit in the Russian army, the Moscow-based 1GTA (Guards Tank Army), ran and left behind most of its equipment and ammo.
This is nonsense: "And barring another spectacular breakthrough by the Ukrainian army, it could be a long stalemate. Unless the requests by President Zelenskyy to NATO for more advanced hardware are met, this is quite likely to happen."
Yesterday the Ukrainians took Bilhorivka, opening the road to Severodonetsk, which the Russians spent months and thousands of troops to capture.
Listen to the conversations between Russian soldiers and their wives and friends at home: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pCZ7WwEcQjg
With Prigozhin recruiting in prisons and Russia buying shells from North Korea and drones from Iran, it's heaaded for a 1918 type collapse.
Nukes: Using one or two nukes, if Russian commanders of them would actually carry out such an order, would not alter the battlefield dynamic on a 1000 km front. So "it takes only one nuke" is inaccurate in military terms. But the fallout would trigger Article 5 and NATO air forces' annihilation of all Russian forces in Ukraine with conventional weapons. Triggering Article 5 would bring Finland to St. Petersburg, but not necessarily with war. This negotiated plebiscite scenario is plausible: https://medium.com/illumination-curated/april-25-russia-ukraine-endgame-2b564512f8c5
I've been to St Petersburg three times. They hate Moscow and would join the EU as a city-state in a heartbeat with the right payoff.
The fallout would make DPR and LPR territories and their adjacent Russian oblasts uninhabitable. Putin is bad, but not mad or suicidal. The West has crossed every red line Putin and Lavrox have laid down with nuke talk since February....and Russia has done nothing. Why? Because the cost of breaking the nuclear taboo is so much higher than any possible military benefit for Russia. From https://www.youtube.com/watchv=sxOO0hCCSk4&t=256s):
"Think for a moment how likely is this conflict actually to go nuclear what am i going to cover today i'm actually going to do a bit of a reverse clickbait video instead of trying to
scare you at the prospect of nuclear war i'm basically going to cover why you shouldn't be scared why most of these atomic saber-rattling threats that we've seen have been blown out of all proportion and i'm going to look instead quite closely at what Russia has been doing in terms of its alerts and its posturing.
I'm then going to do a little bit of a history lesson on nuclear coercion which is the idea that you can threaten countries into doing what you want because you have nukes and they don't i'm going to ask the question does it work then I'm going to look at Russian nuclear doctrine, is Putin a nuclear war monger, what does Russian doctrine say about how they should use atomic weapons and why we should care we're going to take those elements we're going to put them together and we're going to come up with an idea of how probable a nuclear exchange is in Ukraine and how likely is it that Putin presses the big proverbial red button and as a result there's a second sunrise over somewhere in Ukraine.
Having examined why i think that used those use cases are very very limited in nature and very very unlikely to eventuate I will look at the situations where it might hypothetically occur and how other countries can act in order to keep the probability of that happening very very low there's a tldr up front as always because i know not everyone's here for the one hour presentation so here's the caveats on Russian public posturing is probably pretty empty.
Russia is probably not actively intending to deploy nukes against anybody there is a diplomatic reason that they like to rattle the nuclear saber occasionally mostly due to the weakness of their current conventional position. But at the end of the day those threats are probably pretty empty. The second point is that nuclear coercion usually doesn't work historically just because you have nuclear weapons and can threaten to use them usually doesn't mean that you automatically get your way in a crisis.
Russian doctrine and Russian ideas on how to use nuclear weapons are actually very specific. They're very clear on the circumstances in which they would ordinarily use nuclear weapons and surprise surprise none of those cases actually apply in the case of the Ukrainian conflict I will say that deterrence and communication is key going forward and that one of the ways that we can keep the threat of nuclear threat low is the west assuring Russia that in the event that it does deploy nuclear weapons first there will be a response from the west that makes it um let's just say inadvisable for russia to take the step of deploying those nuclear weapons…."
Russia will implode from its own military collapsing like in 1918 and it will reduce itself to a "blob", to use your geopolitical term, just as the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires did from within. The West need only supply Ukraine with the hardware for victory and then get out of the empire-aholic's way as it fragments. The extent to which the collapse resembles Yugoslavia in 1991-95 or the velvet revolutions in eastern Europe in 1989 will depend on local conditions, local governors and nearby neighbors and local ethnic demography.
