Vlad the Aimless Bomber proved he's bluffing by drawing this red line on February 24:

"Putin threatens West with 'consequences greater than any you have faced in history' if it intervenes in his invasion of Ukraine" . The American-led coalition intervened with arms supply, targeting intelligence logistics and training and accepting Finland and Sweden into NATO. Military consequences for the West: zero.

Perun's video shows how Russia gains little to nothing from breaking the nuclear taboo using tactical nukes on 1500 km long front. Russia would totally lose countries like India, Brazil and South Africa if it did.

I have a policy and you don't. Mine is to supply Ukraine with all weapons needed to win except long range HIMARS and to avoid any support that might provoke a Russian response that would trigger Article 5 like Ukrainian pilots flying combat missions from Polish or Slovak airfields. The Slovaks just gave Ukraine their entire air force of MIG29s. Slovakia's NATO neighbors will patrol Slovak air space.

What's your policy? Do nothing because it's just "A Quarrel In A Faraway Country, Between People Of Whom We Know Nothing." (Neville Chamberlain).

If Putin deploys the excuse of a cultural genocide against Russian speakers in Narva and Daugavpils to annex parts of Estonia and Latvia and close the Suwalki Gap between Kaliningrad and Belarus, cutting off the Baltic States from the rest of NATO, would your preferred policy be to abrogate Article 5 because the Baltics have only 6 milllion people? Does Article 5 apply only to big countries like Poland (38m), Germany (85m)? This is the logic of your comment about Ukraine having only 44m vs 5bn people.

What you seem not to understand is that deescalation in this situation runs only one way. Putin and the kleptocratic elite of Russia don't play by your rules. Mafia state kleptocracies sustain themselves only through exporting their business model. Putin's Eurasianist ideologue, Alexander Dugin, who called for the genocide of Ukrainians, whom he called "a race of degenerates who crawled up from sewage", understands this. He's been forging alliances with far right authoritarians around the world:'

"Dugin’s presence in China was significant. He has capitalised on his supposed proximity to Putin — and his linguistic skills (he speaks fluent English and French) — to build himself a considerable international role.

In China, Iran and Turkey, Dugin has become a spokesman and co-ordinator for those who are seeking to destroy America’s global hegemony. Meanwhile in Europe and the US, he has liaised with far-right forces, positioning himself as an ally in the battle against “globalism”.

In his lecture series at Fudan, Dugin argued that Russia and China must jointly build a “multipolar world order”, ending US dominance. At a meeting in April the Russian and Chinese foreign ministers embraced this idea, with Sergei Lavrov assuring Wang Yi that the two nations would “together . . . move towards a multipolar, just, democratic world order”.

In Dugin’s worldview, the continental countries of the Eurasian landmass, centred on Russia, are naturally opposed to the maritime world led by the US and, before that, by the British. Dugin has praised the Nazi philosopher Carl Schmitt for his “clear understanding of the ‘enemy’ facing Europe, Russia and Asia that is the United States along with its . . . island ally, England”.

These anti-western and illiberal ideas have also found a ready audience in Iran. Dugin has been a frequent visitor and is particularly popular with the hardline elements in the regime. In 2015, he flattered his Iranian hosts by telling them that Iran is “the main base of the war against modernity” (a good thing, apparently). Dugin has also regularly visited Turkey, sometimes as a guest of the ruling AKP, and has made common cause with anti-American forces in the government.

In Europe, meanwhile, Dugin and his sponsor, the Russian banker Konstantin Malofeev, have cultivated ties with hard-right parties such as Austria’s Freedom Party, Italy’s League and France’s National Rally — maintaining links through conferences, lectures and meetings in Russia and western Europe.

In the US, Dugin’s natural bedfellows are on the far right. Early in the Trump presidency, Dugin gave an interview to the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, expressing his hopes for “Mr Trump, who I support with all my heart”. He told Jones that pro-Trump and pro-Putin forces should unite against “our common enemy, the globalists”.

Richard Spencer, the American far-right figure, who was filmed shortly after Trump’s victory shouting “Hail Trump” and giving a stiff-armed salute, is also connected to the Russian nationalist. Spencer’s wife has translated Dugin’s work into English." (https://www.ft.com/content/7184ab8c-c155-4198-a844-87b9a98d8b9b

Four years of a kleptocratic Russian asset in the White House nearly destroyed the American republic. Ready for more?

And you propose deescalation with the likes of this? Any ceasefire or treaty concluded with such a state will only be a pause until the next war. Putin proved this point when he likened himself to Peter the Great and the Great Northern War, which lasted 21 years. (Russian victory over Sweden brought the reenserfment of Latvian peasants and the closure of the public schools the Swedes had established.)

The only feasible endgame is to give Ukraine the tools to degrade the Russia's serf army to the point where they do what they did in 1917-18: shoot or frag their officers, give up and walk or drive home (https://medium.com/illumination-curated/ukraines-citizen-vs-russia-s-serf-army-4f6177d5fe20). If you listen to their intercepted conversations with their wives and parents, the supply situation is pushing them closer to this outcome.

I'm "co-dependent with Russia": Since I'm married to a Russian-Latvian who speaks to me in Russian every day and cooks chicken bullionchik like my Russian Jewish babuschka used to, you could say that. But I view psychoanalyzing my counterparty in a debate as deflection, not an evidence-based argument.

"make the alcoholic hit bottom": Half defeated rogue empires, like Germany in 1918, become a revanchist menace. The alternative to the Stunde Null--Zero Hour--bottom Germany and Japan hit in 1945 and the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires hit in 1918 is doing the same job twice.

Example: the North took its boot off the neck of the post civil war South too soon in 1877 and we got 90 years of Jim Crow racist terror, a revived KKK in the 1920s, real voting rights only 100 years after supposed victory and confederate flags in the Capitol on January 6.

The Russian Empire's inevitable bottom: continue the half done breakup started in 1917, reversed by the Soviets, continued in the 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Empire. Your best friends to remake Russia into a normal, non-imperial country that doesn't war on its neighbors in the name of Novorossiya or Russkiy Mir, are the Karelians, Kalmyks, Chechens, Komys, Buryats, Tuvans, Yakuts, Dagestanis, Chuvashis, Tatars, Bashkortostanis...etc.