Starker on 2/5/2023 at 20:50

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Notably, Japan didn't surrender after being hit with nuclear weapons. The war council voted for continuing the war. Even as their air force and navy had been almost completely destroyed and US forces were bombing their cities with impunity, even as their merchant fleet had been destroyed and their industry was in tatters so they couldn't get any more fuel or other war materials, they still were determined to fight the US until extinction on the assumption that the Soviet Union would remain neutral and would, for some reason, help them negotiate a peace favourable to them. And this was a war that Japan started. Likewise, Vietnam was bombed to smithereens and back and they never surrendered. Russia knows this. Even if they think they could somehow manage to break the will of Ukrainians, they at least believe that Ukraine will keep fighting as long as it gets support from the West, just as Japan and Vietnam were counting on the support from the Soviet Union.

Furthermore, if Russia starts exterminating Ukrainians with nuclear weapons and blanketing Europe (and the whole world in the long-term) with radioactive fallout, Putin and other high-ranking officials will immediately become a target of assassination and western countries might very well intervene to destroy Russian forces outside Russia. Russia will lose any and all support it has had and become a pariah heretofore not seen in history. They will become North Korea without the backing of China. Hell, China might decide to take a few chunks of territory back while they are at it.

demagogue on 3/5/2023 at 08:42

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Russia is apparently going to start deporting Ukrainians soon. I thought that was bad news. A lot of the worst cases of ethnic cleansing started with describing them as "deportations". Hell, speaking of the very land they're fighting in, the Crimean Tartars are textbook example #1. Also in the neighborhood: the Armenians, and before them the Circassians. Who even remembers them now?

Aja on 3/5/2023 at 15:14

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I've been working my way through Timothy Snyder's Yale course, and I am very much in over my head. I've watched lectures 1 to 5 twice (the second time was helpful), but from 6 to 11 I'm getting quite lost -- the guy just namedrops regimes and rulers and dates constantly, and I can't keep up. That's what I get for never taking a history course or reading a history book during my degree. I listened to a few of them with my wife, who does have a history degree, and we had to pause constantly ("So you're saying the orthodox church isn't Catholic?" "What is serfdom exactly?" and so on). It's actually kind of remarkable how he's using a very modern conflict as a pretext for an overview of European history in general, and maybe once I've finished the series and have a few touchstones I can continue learning about specifics that interest me because to be honest, trying to read intro history textbooks is just boring in comparison.

Starker on 3/5/2023 at 18:58

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I think a more apt comparison would be not with WW2, but with Afghanistan. Russia is not getting a feeling of being a superpower right now. They are being humiliated. Sure they have aspirations of being a superpower, an underdog who will rise and shake up the current world order, but this has hinged on the West being weak and disorganised, democracies being fragile, and the Russian army being at least somewhat equal to other great powers. Nothing has turned out as they had hoped so far.

heywood on 4/5/2023 at 11:51

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Using nukes would not further the goals of Putin and Xi.
Besides, they aren't in any hurry to end this war, especially Xi.