> 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.

Russia is so weakened I doubt NATO would want them to regain strength if they start dropping nukes.

I presume it would at least make a full embargo more likely?