Thank you, that was a more reasonable response and I will honour it with my final reply here. (Although please don't say what I say "makes no sense" when it's all quite reasonable to me - you're welcome to disagree, and give reasons for disagreeing, but it's on you to point out what's wrong and why. As I have been doing with your posts!)
You are right to bring up the risk of nuclear escalation, and this is definitely something people should take more seriously than they generally do. I genuinely hope our political leaders do!
However, so far at least, Putin's nuclear bark has been much worse than his (thankfully so far nonexistent) bite. He knows that if he starts a nuclear apocalypse he won't just be wiping out the US and Europe, he'll be wiping out Russia too. Horrible though it is to think about, "mutually assured destruction" has been the key thing holding nuclear catastrophe at bay since the 1950s, and while God forbid that we become complacent, there's every reason to believe it still holds good today.
More seriously, what your argument essentially amounts to is "omg he's got nukes, we have no choice but to accept his every demand". What hope would there be for the world if we accepted that logic? Russia and China, maybe North Korea too, would carve up the whole world between them and subject all of humanity to their tyranny. Fantasy you say? In the short term maybe. But we know Xi in China is watching this very closely for clues as to how the West will react if he launches a military invasion of Taiwan - which everyone knows he desperately wants to do. If the West had caved to Putin over Ukraine, there's a strong chance Taiwan would already be under Communist tyranny by now.
Without doubt these are incredibly difficult balances to strike - and the more thoughtful Western leaders are continually balancing them. To respond to one of your earlier posts, I don't see the world in simplistic terms of "good guys" and "bad guys" - America has done plenty of bad stuff that I'm happy to speak out about. But some things - like sticking up for Ukraine - are obviously the right thing to do, and despite the risks, we must not lose sight of the justness of that cause.
Which is why I'm afraid I do smell Russian propaganda when you spend many posts trying to make the ridiculous case that Russia's actions are somehow justified. They are not, in any way.
You are right to bring up the risk of nuclear escalation, and this is definitely something people should take more seriously than they generally do. I genuinely hope our political leaders do!
However, so far at least, Putin's nuclear bark has been much worse than his (thankfully so far nonexistent) bite. He knows that if he starts a nuclear apocalypse he won't just be wiping out the US and Europe, he'll be wiping out Russia too. Horrible though it is to think about, "mutually assured destruction" has been the key thing holding nuclear catastrophe at bay since the 1950s, and while God forbid that we become complacent, there's every reason to believe it still holds good today.
More seriously, what your argument essentially amounts to is "omg he's got nukes, we have no choice but to accept his every demand". What hope would there be for the world if we accepted that logic? Russia and China, maybe North Korea too, would carve up the whole world between them and subject all of humanity to their tyranny. Fantasy you say? In the short term maybe. But we know Xi in China is watching this very closely for clues as to how the West will react if he launches a military invasion of Taiwan - which everyone knows he desperately wants to do. If the West had caved to Putin over Ukraine, there's a strong chance Taiwan would already be under Communist tyranny by now.
Without doubt these are incredibly difficult balances to strike - and the more thoughtful Western leaders are continually balancing them. To respond to one of your earlier posts, I don't see the world in simplistic terms of "good guys" and "bad guys" - America has done plenty of bad stuff that I'm happy to speak out about. But some things - like sticking up for Ukraine - are obviously the right thing to do, and despite the risks, we must not lose sight of the justness of that cause.
Which is why I'm afraid I do smell Russian propaganda when you spend many posts trying to make the ridiculous case that Russia's actions are somehow justified. They are not, in any way.
