Western leaders should not be intimidated by Kremlin threats of nuclear escalation, the head of the CIA said on Saturday, and be willing to consider allowing Anglo-French Storm Shadow missiles to be used inside Russia.
Bill Burns, on a visit to London alongside the head of MI6, said the US had brushed off a previous Russian nuclear scare in autumn 2022, demonstrating that threats from Moscow should not always be taken literally.
“Putin’s a bully. He’s going to continue to sabre rattle from time to time,” Burns said. “We cannot afford to be intimidated by that sabre rattling … we got to be mindful of it. The US has provided enormous support for Ukraine, and I’m sure the president will consider other ways in which we can support them.”
Could be over pretty quick if the bully would fuck off back home and leave Ukraine alone.
Agreed, but that’s not happening. It’s wild that the only possible options anybody sees right now are all-out war or Putin suddenly having a change of heart, and anybody who considers there might be other avenues to pursue is ridiculous.
Fine, the war goes on, and we’ll see hundreds of thousands of people continue to die. Nothing else anybody in the entire world can do, it all rests on Putin changing his mind, and we’ll just have to wait it out. Sucks to suck for all of those people, their families, and their descendants who are going to grow up in a country that’s going to take generations to rebuild.
OK, then we get to see which runs out first, the US military budget from 20 years ago, or Russia’s military age male population.
My money is on our defense spending, and we have lots of video evidence backing that up.
Either he goes home now, or he just runs out of boys. Or Ukraine comes for him at this rate.
He will run out of people, at the expense of both Russian human beings and Ukrainian human beings. That’s the best case scenario with continued war, assuming it doesn’t escalate to directly include other countries.
He’s not going to stop till he is stopped.
The more aid and weapons we give Ukraine, the fewer Ukrainian and more Russian lives are lost.
Hitler taught us appeasement just rewards more aggression, we can’t let this go.