Do you think Putin will use nuclear weapons?

[colddayinhell]

I'm getting very nervous about the ramping up of the war and Putin's calling up of 300,000 reservists. It feels like this is a major escalation. I know that any use of nuclear weapons would mean instant retaliation but it no longer feels like a MAD scenario as it almost feels now like he wants a scorched earth and has nothing to lose and doesn't care that it would destroy everything.

Putin isn't Hitler. Not saying he wouldn't do this but you cant with absolute certainty say he would. He might just be hell-bent on Ukraine (for the time he has left). I know this is unlikely but in striving to avoid a nuclear war everything must be considered. And it may well come to some sort of unfair negotiation with Ukraine in the end..

Putin is only not Hitler because so far he hasn’t been allowed to be. He’s made it clear that should he succeed in Ukraine he wouldn’t stop. The fight in Ukraine is about far more than Ukrainian territory. Like it or not this is existential for democracies and the right of countries to self-determination.

And I’m sorry but the war crimes committed in Ukraine (including the violent torture and rape of innocent men, women and children) is every bit as bad as what happened in WW2.

100%. Perhaps I didn't make myself clear. The war disgusts me. I just think all avenues should be considered. I don't know enough about Ukranian-Russian history. If there is any possibility of negotiation between the two then obviously that's the route to go down rather than planning nuclear strategies.

I think at this stage any negotiations are impossible. Zelenskyy has made it clear he won’t negotiate with Putin. And why would he, he broke the last agreement that was in place (the Minsk agreement). He has also stated many times that he does not believe Ukraine is an independent state, what can there possible be to negotiate. The man cannot be trusted. Any ceasefire would just allow him to rearm and try again.

No. I'm a prepper, btw

Thanks for your response. Like I said I'm not too well-up on these matters 😔 don't know what the Minsk agreement is. Perhaps I'll look at it now.

"Just asked the question earlier, what would be the result if we took out Moscow"

Presume you didn't live through the Cold War. If you had done, you wouldn't ask such a stupid question.

By the way, millions of people live there. Ordinary people like you and me.

Nothing at all wrong with not being clued up, it’s all extremely complicated.

What I would say is don’t take this thread as anything other than outright hysteria. It’s absolutely not reflective of what most experts think. I’d recommend the Ukraine threads (we’re on 32 now I think) for more considered opinion and plenty of expert evidence to back it up.

Putin has repeatedly and viciously committed war crimes in Ukraine which is beyond doubt but he has a long way to go to equal Hitler. Hitler embarked on creating an industrial machine involving hundreds of thousands of willing participants to embark on the annihilation of a race the Jews along with homosexuals, dissidents, disabled, communists and anyone who in any way showed any opposition to National Socialism.

By genocide, the murder of hostages, reprisal raids, forced labour, "euthanasia," starvation, exposure, medical experiments, and terror bombing, and in the concentration and death camps, the Nazis murdered from 15,003,000 to 31,595,000 people, most likely 20,946,000 men, women, handicapped, aged, sick, prisoners of war, forced labourers, camp inmates, critics, homosexuals, Jews, Slavs, Serbs, Germans, Czechs, Italians, Poles, French, Ukrainians, and many others. Among them, 1,000,000 were children under eighteen years of age. And none of these monstrous figures even include civilian and military combat or war deaths.

He invaded and annexed multiple countries starting with Poland, the Czech Republic Austria and many others in short order and at the end of his murderous reign Europe lay in ruins and 50 million people had died.

He also built an unrivalled military-industrial machine that enabled in the early days of the war to have massive superiority in theatre and probably had the fanatical devotion of a goodly proportion of the German population and fellow fascist travellers in other states to aid him.

Maybe Putin wishes he had that sort of following and power but he falls short in so many ways. A mafia kleptocratic state yes, a calculating evil godfather President for sure but he is no Hitler. In the annals of history, there has probably been no one eviler than him and we should be careful in making comparisons as he infamously stands in a terrible class of his own without equal in the annals of history.

My father fought in WW2 for 5 long years and saw at first-hand the destruction of Europe and the evil that he unleashed on the world, it shaped his very soul for the rest of his life and I was brought up reading hundreds of books and discussing, listening and arguing with him about the war as if it was my mother's milk. If anything a more apt comparison would maybe Mussolini.

That is so eloquently put. Putin is nowhere near Hitler. Not even close. He plays dirty high stakes geopolitics and is ruthless but it's for control - of borders and the oligarchs - not ideology. He doesn't sanction genocide. He'd probably have been ok with the disputed area running on interminably and letting Zelenskiy go about his oligarch business same as he had for years if it wasn't for Zelenskiy making a dash for NATO. If anything the whole thing has interrupted his plans to get on board with the alternative international monetary plan. But now it's happening he's flexing.

I’m sorry he doesn’t condone genocide? I’d refer you to the Ukraine thread (again) where @redtoothbrush just posted an example of exactly that thing you say he doesn’t condone. It’s just one of many examples.

I’ve attached a screenshot for those who don’t want to search for it.

I'm just watching Hitler's 1933 Proclamation to the German People when he became Chancellor which is both chilling and a message from history that demagogues can prosper in the ruins of war and financial chaos.

If the Germans had had the resources of the Soviet Union they would probably have been unbeatable. Putin leads a hollowed-out state, beset by corruption and incompetence and where the oligarchs with their yachts and villas around the world have bankrupted both their nation and any military might to which they may aspire but will never attain. His days are numbered of that we can be sure the only fear is if the central state collapses then we are in a world of fiefdoms and warlords with nuclear arsenals and what comes after him could be worse.

Sadly we are cursed to live in interesting times and who knows without the pandemic maybe none of this would ever have happened.

He fights dirty. War is dirty. Civilians have been killed in large numbers in every war for the past century. Russian soldiers are themselves raped and brutalized. Zelenskiy has been employing Nazis to carry out atrocities on the border for years. And supplying white gas to Azerbaijan. While Putin decimated civilian Syria. All of it is fucking horrific. There are no good guys anywhere.

I heard that Putin planned this actually 2 years ago and his plans were delayed by the pandemic 👀🤔

This both sides bollocks you're peddling can get to fuck.

@PerfectlyPreservedQuagaarWarrior 👏👏👏

Oh yeah ofc Zelenskiy is fighting for democracy, not for his yachts and his millions in the Caymans, and he's Paddington, and the Russians are all evil and there are no nazis on the Ukraine payroll. Soz, forgot about that for a moment.

@Wichit just forget about it. You are not making sense, just playing every trick in the book and oozing desperation with your meaningless cut-and-paste words.

It sounds rather like you are equating Zelensky with Putin

What on earth have you been reading. Usforthem stuff?

If it wasn’t for the fact you seem to actually have some sort of posting history I could have sworn you were a Russian bot @Wichit.

The Ukrainians destroyed a bridge. In response Putin has fired multiple missiles into residential areas across Kyiv, Lviv, Zaporizhzhya, Mykolaiv and Ternopil. Remind me again how he and Zelenskiy are as bad as one another.

Bullshit.

If it wasn’t for the fact you seem to actually have some sort of posting history I could have sworn you were a Russian bot @Wichit.

There are a few Westerners who buy this nonsense too, I suppose it's possible we're seeing one of them in the wild here. One thing that's been interesting about the Russian invasion of and attempted genocide in Ukraine is how it's united the worst people on both the left and right in the West.

Good bots usually are the ones with history fyi…

True!