You throw the escalation word into every response without ever defining it, as I've asked you to. I repeatedly asked you what form of support for Ukraine is non-escalatory. No response yet. If ALL support for Ukraine is escalatory, you define yourself as a defeatist appeaser and Putin useful idiot, a direct descendant of the 1939-41 CPUSA, Lindbergh and Father Coughlin America Firsters.
Canada is giving Ukraine 500000 winter uniforms. Escalatory?
HIMARS escalatory?
A No Fly zone? Now that's escalation I'd object to.
Poland, Slovakia, Czech and Bulgaria repairing Ukrainian tanks and IFVs, BTRs? Escalatory or not?
The Baltics giving 20-40% of their equipment to Ukraine? Not an escalation in my view. What's yours?
Iranian drones and missiles? Certainly escalatory.
300000 mobiki sent to Ukraine? Certainly escalation.
Putin refused direct diplomacy with Zelenskiy at the start of the war. Now that Ukraine is winning, he wants to talk--but not to Ukraine. He wants to talk over Ukraine's head as Hitler did with Czechoslovakia in order to create a frozen conflict to give Russia time to prepare for the next round. Ukraine clearly said peace can come only if Russia agrees to withdraw to its 2013 boundaries and pay reparations for war damage. Full stop.
Medvedev and Lavrov have said clearly that Ukraine can save its infrastructure from Russian missiles and drones only if it accepts Russia's annexations. I see nothing to negotiate between these two positions. But if you do, tell me where.
Diplomacy ends wars when both sides are exhausted and know neither can win or when one side is decisively defeated and is ready to cut its losses. In this war only one side is partially exhausted with its professional army defeated, but its amateur army (the 300k mobiki) not yet defeated. The Russian side's hope to is not that it can wear down Ukraine, but in the political pressure in the West to sell out Ukraine, which comes from people like you on the left and tiki-torched Tucker, Trump, Orban, Salvini, LePen and MTG on the right. You're a (hopefully unwitting) ally of a global authoritarian populist and kleptocrats' alliance against Ukraine. Putin's speech against the satanist transgendered cancel culture West was a Russian useful idiot recruitment video directed at the western populist right. His spurious neo-Soviet anti-imperialist rant against the West does the same on the left, which makes people like you Putin's only hope on the left end of our political horseshoe.
The intercepted videos and conversations of the mobiki pressed into service with no training, food, water or weapons clearly show Russia's military position deteriorating. An army that makes its draftees pay for their own sleeping bags, body armor and diesel isn't fighting its opponent to a stalemate, as you previously claimed. It's destined for collapse, as in Russia 1917-18. View Putin's drone and missile campaign against Ukraine's civilian infrastructuve as a last-ditch attempt to stave off collapse.
There's nothing really new in the fifth NPR that wasn't in the first four. Also, the NPR has nothing to do with Putin's threats to use lower yield tactical nukes, threats he just backed off of, though his genocidal mouthpieces on TV are continually breathing nuclear fire against London, Berlin, etc.
From Tom Nicholas in The Atlantic:
"The Biden NPR is woven into something the administration calls “integrated deterrence,” and as a symbolic point, it was released not as a stand-alone report, but along with both the National Defense Strategy and the Missile Defense Review. “Integrated deterrence” sounds very sensible, but what is it, and what role do nuclear weapons play in it? Here’s the 2022 National Defense Strategy:
Integrated deterrence entails working seamlessly across warfighting domains, theaters, the spectrum of conflict, all instruments of U.S. national power, and our network of Alliances and partnerships. Tailored to specific circumstances, it applies a coordinated, multifaceted approach to reducing competitors’ perceptions of the net benefits of aggression relative to restraint. Integrated deterrence is enabled by combat-credible forces prepared to fight and win, as needed, and backstopped by a safe, secure, and effective nuclear deterrent.
If you found all that verbiage hard to parse, so did I. Meanwhile, the Nuclear Posture Review adds this refinement—such that it is:
A key goal of integrated deterrence is to develop tailored options that shape adversary perceptions of benefits and costs. The role of nuclear weapons is well established and embedded in strategic deterrence policy and plans. Non-nuclear capabilities may be able to complement nuclear forces in strategic deterrence plans and operations in ways that are suited to their attributes and consistent with policy on how they are to be employed.
As the writer Fred Kaplan noted, this is just “a slog of cliches.” But what it all boils down to is that we’re going to keep doing what we’ve done for some 60 years or so: The United States will deter its enemies by having very good military forces capable of fighting in various environments, with the ultimate security of America and its allies guaranteed by many hundreds of strategic nuclear warheads deliverable in hours by manned bombers—or in a matter of minutes by sea- and land-based missiles.
