By any measure, the war is going very badly for Russia. None of its claimed aims have been met, and the sinking adds to a long line of apparent military defeats.
This raises the question of what comes next if this kind of thing keeps happening. What does Russia do? Russia appears to have staked the farm on this operation. Can it afford anything less than total victory?
The Russian military has made a sizable investment in tactical nuclear weapons with allegedly 2,000 of them on hand [1]. These small weapons can be detonated in ways that produce minimal fallout but lots of destruction [2]:
> A tactical nuclear weapon (TNW) or non-strategic nuclear weapon is a nuclear weapon which is designed to be used on a battlefield in military situations, mostly with friendly forces in proximity and perhaps even on contested friendly territory. Generally smaller in explosive power, they are defined in contrast to strategic nuclear weapons, which are designed mostly to be targeted at the enemy interior away from the war front against military bases, cities, towns, arms industries, and other hardened or larger-area targets to damage the enemy's ability to wage war.
With every conventional defeat faced by the Russian military and with the massive loss of credibility this causes, at what point does Russia decide that it's time to take the gloves off?
The world stage doesn’t really matter to Russia. It’s pretty clear that their propaganda and words are being aimed at Domestic audiences and allies. And unfortunately it’s working.
If they wanted to use tactical nukes they would have likely used it to take Kyiv. That they did not suggests they aren’t going to use them. Their goal now seems to be annexing/liberating parts of eastern Ukraine and bullying zelenski into neutrality.
I disagree. The "western world", that is Anglo-American centric world order, doesn't matter, but the Kremlin (not its ultra-nationalists calling for total war) knows it needs its ex-Soviet satelites plus China, India, etc.
So far, Western economic sanctions have hastened the decline of the use of the US dollar as a means of exchange, especially among Russia, India, and China.
This transition has severe short-term disruption for Russia, but a wartime (sorry, "military exercise" time) sacrifice is much easier for its citizens to accept.
>So far, Western economic sanctions have hastened the decline of the use of the US dollar as a means of exchange, especially among Russia, India, and China.
Western economic sanctions literally prevent Russian financial accounts containing US dollars from being accessed, right?
Framing this as a problem for the dollars is odd; it's hard to put my finger on why.
All of the economic data shows the dollar is significantly weakened though, not just due to this, but money printing and more. Meanwhile, the Ruble has mostly recovered to prewar levels already https://www.xe.com/currencycharts/?from=RUB&to=USD
That doesn't tell the whole story of course, but it does appear we are witnessing a larger decoupling from the US Petrodollar standard that has been dominant for decades. That wouldn't be possible if the dollar weren't already weak, I don't think.
How about looking at the longer term performance of both currencies in terms of Swiss Francs, on xe.com. It looks to me quite clearly the opposite of your view.
That doesn't tell us what precisely you are mistaken about, and clearly many people have been agreeing with you for years and years, but something is off here.
I mean obviously India and China had to switch to other currencies to trade with Russia, cause Russia can not send or receive dollars and euros, but did it actually have any effect on India <-> China trade?
Has the US or NATO even threatened to go to war if Russia starts using tacnukes in Ukraine? I haven't seen any reports to suggest so, and I've been following the news on this war closely.
(The US has threatened more sanctions if Russia uses WMDs. That threat was in response to signs Russia was getting ready to use chemical weapons.)
OK, but even when detonated high enough above the ground that no appreciable fallout is produced, nukes are quite destructive. In fact, for many kinds of targets, cities being one, the altitude that maximizes destruction is high enough.
My uneducated guess is that the primary goal of the latest rhetoric about the possible use of chemical weapons is intended to make this more clear. If "we" (not the US yet, but other countries that are nearer) are signalling a readyness to respond kinetically if chemicals are used, surely the message is that nuclear would trigger an even greater response.
The UK has stated that "all options are in the table" if there is a chemical attack. The implication to me is that a kinetic response would then be a possibility, since everything else is basically being done at this point..
If a tactical nuke is used, then it is proof that escalation to nuclear weapons does not imply the global nuclear holocaust that has been acting as a deterrent.
It eliminates the logic of not going to war.
Not that "logic" has any connection to "appetite" or that excuses require it.
The elimination of large chunks of the Ukrainian army in a single detonation could lead to the stated goal of the invasion, which was regime change in Kyiv.
It would be a calculated risk that the response from the West would be much like it has been so far. We're not talking "The Day After," but more like a really big bomb and 2,000 more where that came from. The response to the invasion has been fragmented at best, and it's not unreasonable to think that would continue, especially given a county that has demonstrated a willingness to use nuclear weapons in battle.
I'm not saying this is likely, but more speculating as to what series of events would cause the scenario to play out.
There's no massive army operating in one place. It's a bunch of units running around in the woods, hills, towns and cities. Their largest forces are probably near the largest Russian forces, so sure, if they're willing to cull their own.
> The elimination of large chunks of the Ukrainian army in a single detonation could lead to the stated goal of the invasion, which was regime change in Kyiv.
I don't know, I'm quite worried. I don't think this is as cut and try as people make it out to be.
If Russia did launch a limited tactical strike on Ukraine, let's say super low-yield, honestly not much more than the MOABs we fired off in Iraq, is the USA really going to risk Berlin, or US cities getting vaporized to defend a non-NATO country?
> If Russia did launch a limited tactical strike on Ukraine, let's say super low-yield, honestly not much more than the MOABs we fired off in Iraq, is the USA really going to risk Berlin, or US cities getting vaporized to defend a non-NATO country?
The Baltics and Poland have already been pushing for NATO intervention because they want Russia checked because they don't want to be next; Article 5 is nice, but they’d rather stop Russia before it's on their land.
Nuking Ukraine, even a tiny little nuke, ratchets that up enormously and forces the US and Western European NATO powers to decide how to secure the eastern flank of the alliance.
Ukraine has also not yet attempted to hit Moscow (the city, not the ship) with missiles.
Once a nuclear bomb is used, a lot of gloves will come off, not just the Russian ones, and so far Ukraine appears to have a lot of extremely competent military partners and Russia has a reluctant Belarus.
What missiles capable of striking Moscow does Ukraine have? It's 500km from the closest point within Ukraine's borders. That's at the limit of long-range variants of Iskander, and Ukraine only has older stuff like Tochka.
Something can be a problem without it making sense to worry about it.
If Russia is using nukes, it becomes particularly absurd to continue to follow rules purported to appease them so they don't use nukes.
At best it's a transparently nonsensical excuse that conceals some other motivation.
When important people say they are against doing X, Y, or Z because of the risk of nuclear war, we can at least pretend they are serious as long as no nukes have been used yet.
But is there any other motivation they could have? There's one that seems very obvious to me, especially when I saw the reaction to Lindsey Graham's comments about regime change.
> With every conventional defeat faced by the Russian military and with the massive loss of credibility this causes, at what point does Russia decide that it's time to take the gloves off?
I believe any use of nuclear weapons would end Russia as a state, tactical or otherwise. They know this, why is why they resort to their conventional (although brutal) warfare methods.
They have been threatening nuclear weapons since the start of the war for various reasons, and thats because nuclear weapons _only_ work as a threat.
> What does Russia do? Russia appears to have staked the farm on this operation. Can it afford anything less than total victory?
I haven't been tracking developments very closely, but a minimal set of objectives would be claiming land up to the Donetsk/Luhansk oblast boundaries under DPR/LPR flags, which can be framed as a victory. Nukes are unlikely compared to simply changing what "victory" means.
They've destroyed the dams blocking the canals supplying Crimea, established a land bridge between Crimea and the Donbass and cut off most of Ukraine's black sea access. That's enough for a "victory" in terms of domestic propaganda (especially if they have footage of captured Azov battalion soldiers), which might be why they gave up on Kiev and are manoeuvring to solidify their gains in the east.
>With every conventional defeat faced by the Russian military and with the massive loss of credibility this causes, at what point does Russia decide that it's time to take the gloves off?
I've been thinking about this possibility for a while:
* Putin fires tactical atomic weapon at some empty plot of Ukrainian land, and announces it as a "demonstration" of Russian might.
* The weapon is a dud.
I'm not sure whether this outcome might not be worse in the long run, in terms of geopolitical stability, than if the weapon performs as expected!
This raises the question of what comes next if this kind of thing keeps happening. What does Russia do? Russia appears to have staked the farm on this operation. Can it afford anything less than total victory?
The Russian military has made a sizable investment in tactical nuclear weapons with allegedly 2,000 of them on hand [1]. These small weapons can be detonated in ways that produce minimal fallout but lots of destruction [2]:
> A tactical nuclear weapon (TNW) or non-strategic nuclear weapon is a nuclear weapon which is designed to be used on a battlefield in military situations, mostly with friendly forces in proximity and perhaps even on contested friendly territory. Generally smaller in explosive power, they are defined in contrast to strategic nuclear weapons, which are designed mostly to be targeted at the enemy interior away from the war front against military bases, cities, towns, arms industries, and other hardened or larger-area targets to damage the enemy's ability to wage war.
With every conventional defeat faced by the Russian military and with the massive loss of credibility this causes, at what point does Russia decide that it's time to take the gloves off?
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-60664169
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tactical_nuclear_weapon