Putin is rerunning the film of 1939 with Ukraine playing the part of Austria (and Czechoslovakia and Poland) and Joe Biden, in Putin's casting, standing in for Neville Chamberlain. In place of lebensraum Putin's aim is to reconstitute the Soviet empire in Central and Easter Europe. He is using the same tactics of Hitler, making demands that he knows are unacceptable,
Russia’s demands are so sweeping that many political analysts view them as untenable, signifying either a bargaining chip for Russia or a justification for war when its demands are inevitably rejected.
making the arguments of "encirclement", for inclusion of ethnic Russians or Russian speakers in a Greater Russia, and manufacturing "incidents" to justify full invasion of Ukraine.
... By massing troops on the border and then publishing two draft treaties that had echoes of Cold War-era demands, Mr. Putin created an international crisis and made plain his desire to wind back the clock 30 years, to just before the collapse of the Soviet Union. He demanded that Ukraine halt its embrace of the West, that the United States and its allies halt all military activity in Eastern Europe and Central Asia and that NATO freeze its expansion to the east and roll back military deployments near Russia’s borders.
Putin knows, as Hitler knew of France and Britain, that NATO cannot stop him without recourse to tactical nuclear weapons, that the United States will not engage in nuclear war with Russia over Ukraine, or indeed over the Baltic states or, I hope, over Poland, NATO Article 5 be damned.
...Mr. Putin is dealing from a strong hand: He demonstrated in 2014, with the annexation of Crimea, his willingness to pick off Russian-speaking territory. And he is confident that the United States and its NATO allies will not commit forces to the task of pushing back.
He is thus, in the words of this article, attempting to divine Biden's "red line" for U.S.-Russia nuclear war. Biden has repeatedly said, to Putin and publicly, that no nuclear war is winnable.
President Biden has set down a clear "red line" and the consequences for overstepping it with a further Russian invasion of Ukraine:
Mr. Biden has attempted...to deter Russia with unusually specific warnings about imposing a series of sanctions that would go far beyond what the West agreed upon in 2014, after the Russian annexation of Crimea. The new sanctions under consideration range from cutting Russia off from the system of global financial settlements to imposing new restrictions on American and Western semiconductors, which Russia employs for its military modernization.
And Putin:
...warned President Biden...that any economic sanctions imposed on Russia if it moves to take new military action against Ukraine could result in a “complete rupture” of relations between the two nuclear superpowers, a Russian official told reporters on Thursday. evening.
"Complete rupture", hmm. That doesn't seem to this non-diplomatist to mean nuclear war but I don't know what it does mean. Is Putin really so dense that he does not understand that to Americans not playing in the same sandbox with the Russians is our most fervent dream. A "complete rupture" in relations? Beat me whip me!
[Putin foreign policy advisor Yuri] Ushakov said Mr. Putin warned that any new, harsh sanctions would be a mistake, and that, as Mr. Ushakov put it, “in this situation, it’s better not to make such mistakes.”
That is clearer in the language of diplomacy on military confrontation (albeit still vague and not implicating nuclear war).
I think the Americans are naive, and wrong, here:
...American officials believe that Mr. Putin has not yet decided to order the invasion — and may still be convinced to back off. So they have made public their plans for extreme economic sanctions if an invasion starts, while signaling they are open to diplomacy.
It is Putin's fondest dream to reconstitute the U.S.S.R. whose dissolution he has called "the greatest geostrategic catastrophe of the 20th century."
No, it does not mean war as in end-of-world World War III. It certainly means continuing aggressive war by Russia in Ukraine and, in my read anyway, means a 50-50 chance of conventional war with the U.S. via NATO.
