Western leaders should not be intimidated by Kremlin threats of nuclear escalation, the head of the CIA said on Saturday, and be willing to consider allowing Anglo-French Storm Shadow missiles to be used inside Russia.
Bill Burns, on a visit to London alongside the head of MI6, said the US had brushed off a previous Russian nuclear scare in autumn 2022, demonstrating that threats from Moscow should not always be taken literally.
“Putin’s a bully. He’s going to continue to sabre rattle from time to time,” Burns said. “We cannot afford to be intimidated by that sabre rattling … we got to be mindful of it. The US has provided enormous support for Ukraine, and I’m sure the president will consider other ways in which we can support them.”
Agreed, but that’s not happening. It’s wild that the only possible options anybody sees right now are all-out war or Putin suddenly having a change of heart, and anybody who considers there might be other avenues to pursue is ridiculous.
Fine, the war goes on, and we’ll see hundreds of thousands of people continue to die. Nothing else anybody in the entire world can do, it all rests on Putin changing his mind, and we’ll just have to wait it out. Sucks to suck for all of those people, their families, and their descendants who are going to grow up in a country that’s going to take generations to rebuild.
OK, then we get to see which runs out first, the US military budget from 20 years ago, or Russia’s military age male population.
My money is on our defense spending, and we have lots of video evidence backing that up.
Either he goes home now, or he just runs out of boys. Or Ukraine comes for him at this rate.
He will run out of people, at the expense of both Russian human beings and Ukrainian human beings. That’s the best case scenario with continued war, assuming it doesn’t escalate to directly include other countries.
He’s not going to stop till he is stopped.
The more aid and weapons we give Ukraine, the fewer Ukrainian and more Russian lives are lost.
Hitler taught us appeasement just rewards more aggression, we can’t let this go.
I would like the US to take direct action against Russia to end it. Like a single missile to blow Putin up.
This has the possible side effect of nuclear war.
I’d be happier if he were to say fall out of a window. That or Russia becomes New Ukraine. Or both, both would be good too.
Then Putin should be very scared of that risk and withdraw immediately!
Or the Russian people should be scared of that and force him to withdraw.
Who am I kidding, the Russian people can’t stand up to President Putin, they’re too busy listening to General Stolichnaya.
He should, but he doesn’t appear to be. That puts the ball in everybody else’s court, unfair though it is.
A large number of Russians are trying to protest. They typically get killed or imprisoned. It’s hard to fault the remainder for not risking their lives for a probably fruitless attempt at dissent.
The ones trying to protest should escalate, cause clearly both the ballot boz and soapbox have become ineffective. Hell depending on how they do it it could be less lethal to them.
It is in our court, so we should vastly escalate, both support for Ukraine, and we should start enforcing a no-fly zone.
During WW2, I don’t think the Russians looked at the invading, brutalizing Germans and said ‘well, poor things are being forced by Hitler, we shouldn’t fight back’. And Germans stood against Hitler openly, they died for that.
Every day that goes by the cost for the Russian people increases. This is their country, they can take it back or watch it burn.
But the moronic belief that the west is weak and can’t or won’t stop them, it’s the same belief Hitler had, and will lead to the same place, the utter destruction of their country, and the partition between the west and east.