All they have to do is walk away. Just walk away.
They can't, by which I mean their leadership can't.
What most in the west don't understand about russian (and also chinese) culture is this:
You can't lose face.
Here in the west after the massive fiasco that was the war on terror, what changed? nothing, nobody went to prison, not the politicians that voted for it, not the glowies who falsified the info, not the journos that promoted the propaganda. In better times they would at least lost their jobs but we don't even get that anymore.
So our government can just walk away of any of fuckup whenever the overton window shifts, but not the russians.
The russian people will tolerate insane corruption, ineptitude and even famine, but the moment the leaders lose face its over, not just because of national pride but because
it means the leadership can be killed and replaced, it give the people an opening. Its akin to the ancient chinese concept of "mandate of heaven", in that if you lose it you're fucked, you can't be the emperor anymore and your entire government if not your entire dynasty was over.
Russia offers absolutely nothing to the west
It does, or it would've if boomers with a grudge hadn't fucked up the capitalist transition after '91. Any analyst with an IQ above room temp knew after '89 that china would be the next problem and that unlike the ussr they were going to be an economic superpower because they were not really communist anymore, so their growth would not be limited to whatever the price of oil was and their population would no longer face another of mao's famines while the soviets had to deal with scarcity all the way to the end of the ussr itself. After the tanks rolled into tiananmen in '89 only those with their heads up their asses still believed china was going to become a liberal democracy, it was even more obvious when despite the weak-ass blockade we put in place was subverted by, of all countries, taiwan which wanted some of that cheap ass chinese slave labor, thus showing china could keep its insane growth levels no matter how many students got smeared on the streets.
Had we played our cards right and let bygones be bygones russia would be west-aligned, europe would be completely energy-independent from the middle east, we would've access to insane mineral wealth, and more importantly the russians would shift their military focus to the far east to protect their territories from china which has never let its irredentism of getting back that land from russia, something that again any analyst worth a fuck is well aware of. In this scenario russia would act as a giant nuclear buffer on the west while our pacific fleet keeps the chinese at bay in the east, we would have beijing by the balls.
Instead we let russia crumble, we helped keep that fucking joke yeltsin in power by hijacking their elections, we let him fuckup over and over because of the economic opportunities the firesale of soviet assets could be to our corporations. Joke is on us tho because the former communist apparatchiks took all of that and became the oligarchs who then created putin, ain't that a bitch?
The end goal of this apparatus is to form a one-world government that can never be destroyed.
Any empire eventually crumbles from the corruption and rot within...........but now there's AI which can keep any shitshow going with maximum efficiency as long as its not limited by political bullshit like chatGPT is.
Which is why we're investing such insane amounts of money on it.
Worse than Stalin/Mao killing between 30-50 million of their own people?
Worse than pol pot doing his best to exterminate most of his own people?
Worse than the death cult empire known as the Aztecs?
Keep in mind null said worse for
us, not for them.
I perfectly understand someone in your situation detesting the west in general, but to say the US/NATO is the most evil thing ever is a tad over exaggerating.
Its not if you were/are at the receiving end of our guns, like say the iraqis, the serbians, half of LATAM, north vietnam, etc...
They are already striking inside ruzzia
Now you're doing the same shit vatniks do.
and I really don't know why Putin will make a more issue after shelling some town in ruzzia than shelling some town in annexed parts of Ukraine.
But belgorod is not moscow, the moment muscovites start dying his power base will be affect and calling for revenge.
He can't afford to ignore that, he can't afford to lose face like that.
Also Ukraine probably have zero nuclear warheads
It has
zero, and no means to make more.
We made sure of that in 1993, enough with the cope.
I still don't think anyone is going to use nuclear weapons, no one wants to be that guy because consequences are unpredictable
Putin isn't going to use nukes anywhere. Using nukes would not go over well.
Thing is putin doesn't know what's gonna happen if he uses nukes but he knows that if he doesn't and he loses the war because of that then its over, for him and for his entire circle.
At the same time he knows, and we know, that if ukraine gets nuked the exchange ends there because nobody will get nuked for ukraine, period. We might push sanctions to the limit and start and even bigger cold war with insane levels of defense spending, but we're not letting our entire nation burn to cinders for ukraine.