Russia: ‘If this aggression continues we might have to be forced to use a nuclear weapon’
Ukraine: ‘What nuclear weapon?’
Russia:
Only UK tabloids are making the claim of Ukraine hitting a warehouse that contained Satan 2 rockets so take with a really huge grain of salt until outside nuclear experts detect anything
I would imagine it’s more likely a quality control failure, or a fuck-up with the test fire, than an Ukrainian strike. Russians can blow their missiles up without any help!
Like I said, huge grain of salt. Could be really huge news if there’s some truth to it
It’s the Daily Heil, so I would wait for a trustworthy source.
Fog of war alert.
“Toropets, Tver Oblast … 30,000 tonnes of explosive ordnance were detonated, which means 750,000 shells. …”
Lots of shells were outdoors, having just arrived by train. Three months of supply gone.
This might get got an entry in the list of largest non-nuclear explosions of all time. 
This is a guy I believe.
Yeah, authoritarian regimes strive to maintain an aura of inevitability and invulnerability, all the way until the polished surface breaks, revealing the hollowness inside, and the whole thing comes crashing down.
Looking back to the fall of the Soviet Union, even the experts who knew about their internal problems and economic trouble and so on generally didn’t expect a superpower to just collapse.
“A lost war of aggression” has been the country’s greatest driver of political change, he says.
Timothy Snyder has likewise said that for political change to happen Russia must lose its last imperial war.
According to Snyder, the most important thing to understand about empires is that they must lose their last imperial war. He urged Europeans against giving peace to Russia, saying that the Russian empire would instead have to be defeated in Ukraine, as “the idea of victory is very important for freedom”. To this point, Snyder reminded his audience that “the reason the European Union could come about is because the Europeans lost their colonial wars.” In the case of Europe, “European empire ended as European integration started” and for Ukraine, it should be “more like the story of what happens to other post-imperial states… Freedom for Ukraine involves these moral issues. It involves a sense of the future.”
ETA:
Makes perfect sense. Those sailors know what it’s like when there’s smoke everywhere and something may explode at any moment, so frontline trenches will feel like home.
If he’s not found dead tomorrow beneath his 12th storey window, with a bottle of vodka taped to his right hand, then I’ll take this seriously.
And one has to presume much the same thing is happening with all types of goods, including those inside the bowels of the trucks lined up at the border. The passage of these cars is only the most visible evidence that the sanctions regime is not preventing expensive, important items travelling from Europe into Russia. For the time being, policymakers and businesses seem powerless or unwilling to prevent this murky trade.
So now Putin is saying he’s ready to nuke any country that fights Russia using weapons provided by another nuclear power, with the obvious implication being that he might drop some nukes on Ukraine if the United States doesn’t stop helping them defend their soveriegnty.
To state the obvious, wouldn’t a nuclear war in Ukraine—which is not only on Russia’s doorstep but a territory Putin has been actively trying to acquire as a critical part of his reconstituted Soviet Empire—be much much worse for Russia than it would be for the United States? Chernobyl is still very much in living memory, I have a hard time believing many Russians are eager to deal with nuclear fallout blowing their way from Ukraine again.
Such a tragic waste of life. I grew up during the civil war in Yugoslavia. No one should have to go through this. Russia has to stop.
