I’d love to hear what folks think about this solution to the war in Ukraine:
NATO announces publically: in 2 weeks/10 days/5 days/whatevs we enter the war.
NATO will push all Russian forces out of Ukraine, back to before the 2014 annexation of Crimea.
NATO will grant free passage back to Russian for those not fighting back.
NATO will not cross into Russia territory, nor strike inside Russia unless attacked from inside Russia. An overwhelming response will be dealt in response.
Any use of nukes by Russia (or friends of) will be met with a devastating response.
Russia can stay in Russia until it learns to behave properly, ready to accept responsibility and begin building back good will with the rest of the civilized world.
I’ve no business thinking I’m qualified to suggest such big matters, but I can’t get this idea out of my head. I’m sure many others have suggested similar ideas and there are obvious reasons this won’t work. I value the opinion many here.
It does hinge on one thing… some high mucky-muck in the Russian gov’t (Foreign Minister? Wasn’t the bald guy at the UN…) said Russia would only use nukes in response to an “existential threat”. Putin may have also stated this. This why I would have NATO stop at the Russian border and only strike inside Russian territory in response to strikes from inside Russia. Step 5. takes care of Russia (and perhaps the rest of the world🤨) in the event of Russian nuke use.
We, the world, will let Russia exist inside the Russian border; therefore, no existential threat. And no nukes.
Just seems to me this has to end and russia must be defeated. How else but the combined power of NATO?
A lot (almost all) of the suggestions I’ve seen about what NATO could do set NATO up to be a force to oppose Russia. This, in my completely amateur opinion, is false. NATO is a defensive organization. Russia, and before it the USSR, have been de facto the threat that NATO has defended against, but it is not a necessary foil.
Its involvement in Bosnia and Herzegovina may belie this…I was not politically active when that occurred and I haven’t studied it since, but I suspect that effort may have only reinforced that NATO is a defensive organization. NATO will not and arguably should not act simply to counter Russia when non-member nations are involved.
I’ve hesitated to post this for weeks because it’s not an area of my expertise, but IMO it’s consistent with NATO’s stated position. NATO won’t step in simply to stop Russia. There’s a higher bar.
Expanding on @smulder’s point about “Oops, WW3”, it’s pretty much impossible that the fighting would remain confined within Ukraine if NATO countries entered the war as co-belligerents. For now, things are proceeding in line with the etiquette of proxy wars that was worked out during the Cold War: If one of the superpowers starts fighting a third party (e.g. US in Vietnam, USSR in Afghanistan), the other superpower may supply weapons, training, economical support, etc., but not enter the war in a way that would result in armies of the two superpowers shooting at each other. This keeps the fighting limited to the territory of the third party: the active belligerent may attack weapons shipments when they enter the conflict zone, but not before.
If the armed forces of NATO countries started directly fighting against Russian forces in Ukraine, Russia would consider it fully within its rights to attack targets in NATO countries, no matter what assurances NATO made in advance. This is why even a NATO-enforced no-fly zone over Ukraine is not an option - a Russian warplane shot down by anyone other than the Ukrainian military is pretty much a direct road to WW3.
Yeah I think this does get pointed out enough. A Belgian NATO plane shooting down a Russian jet will be seen as justification for open attacks on London and Los Angeles, and for encouraging proxies to do the same.
This one struck me as interesting both because it’s a pretty dramatic figure in both absolute and relative terms; and because it (in my very much layman’s understanding) seems high enough make one wonder what’s keeping them in the field: fighting to over 50% casualties is ‘belligerents who had a particularly bad time in WWI’ level stuff. Is the DPR really motivated? Have the Chechen Cheerleaders been particularly effective in emphasizing that there are much worse ways to die than being killed by Ukrainian forces? Is “DPR militia” an essentially fictitious category and sufficiently heavily integrated with LPR and/or some flavor of Russian forces that the effective losses of the actual fighting units are considerably lower?
There have been reports that men in the DPR have gone into hiding to avoid being press-ganged and sent to the front. DPR soldiers are used as cannon fodder to keep Russian losses down. They have been photographed with Second World War-vintage rifles and helmets.
For months there have been reports of civilians being conscripted into the militia by force, with low morale and poor quality weapons, including rifles that went out of service decades ago. Last month, Ukraine’s SBU security service claimed militiamen compared conditions to slavery and were ready to desert.
Disaffected former proxy officials such as Yevgeniy Mikhailov said last month that untrained reservists from Donetsk had been sent to the front line because Russia had stopped sending conscripts. One resident told the BBC last month that there had been “tragedies everywhere”.
I’ve read about the intense conscription and under-equipment; I’m just wondering how they are keeping it up with casualty numbers like that. Over half dead or wounded suggests a level of risk where dropping your weapons and running toward the first Ukrainian position that looks capable of capturing you the second you are out of sight of the ‘recruitment’ station would be a substantial risk reduction; as well as one where only the most brutal(and well equipped) coercive measures would dissuade people from giving serious consideration to killing the people sending them off to get slaughtered, since the control value of threats of violence and/or death declines as what you are demanding approaches being a death sentence anyway.
The 's don’t care, and the conscripts probably believe will shoot them as traitors and the Chechens will shoot them and/or their families, or worse, if they desert.
My understanding is that what little support there ever was for a presence in those regions has long since evaporated under the heat of mob rule. Add to that: erasing local populations, or at least the fighting age males, to clear a little “living space” for the invaders’ settlers is what usually happens, no?
One interesting thing I saw being pointed out in the early days of the war was that all those planes including the many foreign-owned leased ones will be very hard to get compliant with international regulations again once they fall behind on their required maintenance and it doesn’t take long until they are basically totalled.
The Wired article says that if they start swapping parts around without keeping records the planes will become worthless, because every aircraft needs a complete maintenance history.
“All these parts are quite highly controlled,” says Bilotkach. “The manufacturers know which particular spare part is going to be installed on which aircraft. You need proper records of that.” But required paperwork is unlikely to be maintained. “As soon as an aircraft doesn’t have a proper maintenance record, the value of those aircraft drops to zero,” says Vasigh.
When Putin is ready to end the war he can bloody well pull his troops out of Ukraine. The only concession Ukraine should make in a negotiation is a pledge not to join NATO. Anything else will reward Putin’s bad behaviour toward one neighbour and encourage more of it toward others.
This war is going to grind on for years. It will stop when Putin finds it expedient to stop it or if he’s deposed. Until that happens the West needs to keep the weapons and the humanitarian support flowing to Ukraine and needs to keep up the economic pain it’s imposing on Russia.
Another point the author of the article misses is that Russia is already in the process of once again turning inward and isolating itself. It’s really the only direction the Kremlin can take things in now that it’s gone all-in on a land war in Europe. Trying to engage with Putin in order to stop this outcome is a pointless task for the West; we instead need to support his opponents (domestic and exiled).
's don’t care, and the conscripts probably believe 
will shoot them as traitors and the Chechens will shoot them and/or their families, or worse, if they desert.
