For Those Who Might Be Wondering Why We Might Be In Ukraine

[HisArpy]

The US is not going to put combat troops in Ukraine.

I actually think one of the best guarantees we could offer would be to place a military base in Eastern Ukraine.

Think about it, it would give us a forward base in the event China tries to attack Taiwan or enforce the 9 dash line, act as a deterrent to future incursions by Russia, and provides a guarantee of US support without Ukraine needing NATO membership or proliferating nukes.

It would also protect US interests in the region for valuable resources as well as giving stability to the Black sea and surrounding areas along with letting the Taliban in Afghanistan know we're still watching them.

 

[BabyBoomer50s]

Then there won't be any peace agreement with Russia and Ukraine will provide its own guarantees and build nukes.

Interesting take. Have my doubts that Ukraine can achieve that without extensive external support but if they can, great!

 

[BabyBoomer50s]

I actually think one of the best guarantees we could offer would be to place a military base in Eastern Ukraine.

Think about it, it would give us a forward base in the event China tries to attack Taiwan or enforce the 9 dash line, act as a deterrent to future incursions by Russia, and provides a guarantee of US support without Ukraine needing NATO membership or proliferating nukes.

It would also protect US interests in the region for valuable resources as well as giving stability to the Black sea and surrounding areas along with letting the Taliban in Afghanistan know we're still watching them.

Do you think the American public would support that? Perhaps 30 years ago, but I sure don’t believe they would today.

If the possibility of US boots on the ground does come into play in the weeks and months ahead, I’m sure we’ll see some polling that will give an indication of American’s sentiment on that question.

 

[HisArpy]

Do you think the American public would support that? Perhaps 30 years ago, but I sure don’t believe they would today.

If the possibility of US boots on the ground does come into play in the weeks and months ahead, I’m sure we’ll see some polling that will give an indication of American’s sentiment on that question.

I think that if it was packaged properly, it would sell to the public. It would have to be done to emphasize that the purpose was to prevent war, not provoke one.

Project it as peace through strength. Wars aren't fought where the US is established, and if someone tries they get squashed faster than a housewife swats a fly. Just ask Syria how that worked out for them.

 

[Baztrachian]

I propose removing the President via impeachment.

Fat fucking chance.

 

[HisArpy]

Fat fucking chance.

They tried. Twice. They didn't succeed because Congress understood there's no Constitutional impeachment mechanism because of a Democrat temper tantrum.

 

[Baztrachian]

They tried. Twice. They didn't succeed because Congress understood there's no Constitutional impeachment mechanism because of a Democrat temper tantrum.

At this point the smart Democrats (all two of them) realize that any impeachment effort they make will result in galvanizing support for the President.

 

[BabyBoomer50s]

They tried. Twice. They didn't succeed because Congress understood there's no Constitutional impeachment mechanism because of a Democrat temper tantrum.

So funny how many times they thought they could get rid of him. So many times they thought to themselves, “we’ve got him now!”

Russia hoaxes, futile impeachments, a litany of silly prosecution attempts, a couple of assassination attempts, the Harris “joy” campaign…He just keeps rolling over them with smile on his face.

Bless their little hearts

 

[HisArpy]

At this point the smart Democrats (all two of them) realize that any impeachment effort they make will result in galvanizing support for the President.

The funny part is that 1 of the 2 has has a stroke. Which says a lot about the rest of the D's.

 

[ChloeTzang]

At this point the smart Democrats (all two of them) realize that any impeachment effort they make will result in galvanizing support for the President.

The issue is that for most Americans, Ukraine is a minor side-issue compared to everything else. And sadly, Biden made Ukraine totally partisan and tied Ukraine to the Democrats - and Ukraine, being very dependant on US military support, had very little choice but to go along, despite it being obvious that Biden was using them in an attempt to sway US domesytic political issues.

The Ukrainians were not politically astute enough on the ins and outs of US politics to counter this by securing strong GOP support (in contrast to Israel, who have a firm grip on both sides). Ukraone by contrast could not afford to piss Biden off the way Netanyahu could. Unlike Israel, the Ukrainians wern't that interested in the USA until this war broke out so they didn't have a lot of grounding in US politics and how it works. The end result was they likely didn't cement in GOP support and they lost Trump completely - he really does not like Ukraine or Zelensky and he DOES like Putin, for whatever reason.

For American voters, American issues will ALWAYS carry the day, and Trump is doing what a majority of ACTUAL (as opposed to non-existent illegal) American voters want. MOST Americans want illegals gone - all of them - and the Democrats are so set in their ways that they cannot abandon that pro-illegal woke mindset that pisses so many people off. And an issue like deporting illegals outweighst Ukraone for most American voters. For their own reasons, Democrats choose to ignore how pissed most people are with all the illegal aliens, and that's biting them now because the Democrats firmly tied themselves to illegals and continue to do so with every news clip

Factor in an accurate census and allocating seats based on ACTUAL US citizens as opposed to illegals, and the GOP taking the gloves of on districting and at last copying the Democrats tactics, and also starting to take steps that ONLY US cirizens vote, and the Democrats are pretty much fucked, barring Trump creating an economic disaster, which is on the cards - biut the corrollary of that is he may suceed in pinning even that on the Democrats. Entirely likely. That and the Democrats are folding to their own extremist base like a used diaper and are busy completely losing the center to Trump - and one just as to accept that the Democrats are done for a decade.

I might be pissed about Ukraine enough to vote against Trump but I am a anomaly - most Americans will not.

 

[ChloeTzang]

Russian fuel shortages haha - you don't see this in Ukraine.

https://twitter.com/x/status/1958228462243635269

 

[ChloeTzang]

Ukraine's 2025 Counteroffensive: Initial Foreshocks

The Pokrovsk and Sumy counterattacks may only be the tip of the iceberg; once back from diplomatic duties abroad, Zelensky looks likely to let a substantial counteroffensive proceed.

Andrew Tanner, Aug 20
https://roguesystemsrecon.substack....e&r=c5g4v&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

Media coverage of the Ukraine War continues to stand in stark contrast with the material evidence on the ground. It’s an ongoing insult to all to those still shedding their blood, as well as the memory of the tens of thousands who have perished in defense of Ukraine, how the story of their fight gets so distorted by journalists and politicians abroad. On the plus side, this silly media milieu also functions as a highly effective smokescreen, a maskirovka in the true Soviet usage, helping cloak Ukraine’s true capabilities and plans. If you apply a consistent logic to evaluating Ukraine’s fight since 2022, then the trope of exhausted Ukrainian fighters barely clinging to ground can only be seen as deliberately manufactured for a purpose. Ukraine’s leadership appears to be exploiting this mistaken narrative to prepare another surprise for Putin. Hopefully this will be the shock that finally does him in. But hey, maybe I’m wrong and nothing will happen at all.

Still, important signs continue to appear suggesting that something big is afoot. The signals are still localized and ambiguous - as they should be. The pattern still fits what I’ve been watching for all summer: a shaping campaign of the kind that usually precedes a ground offensive.

Ukrainian activity on several fronts also intensified over the last week. Exactly as anticipated (and required) Ukrainian reinforcements entered the fight north of Pokrovsk, inflicting a nasty defeat on the orc infiltration wave that slipped past the main Ukrainian line near Dobropillya. In Sumy, Ukrainian fighters reportedly began throwing the enemy back across the border into Kursk; fully clearing the strip of land the orcs occupied this year is now in sight. This is not the behavior of an army at the end of its rope. Ukraine isn’t reacting to every orc move in a bid to reverse it to avoid looking too weak in negotiations. Ukrainian forces are acting like a fighter that slowly maneuvers their enemy into making a fatal mistake. The net result is a Muscovite invasion force being chewed up more efficiently than ever, while Ukrainian defenders have reduced their own loss rates by half.

Continued.....

 

[ChloeTzang]

.....
What 500 or more confirmed orc deaths every day against at most a hundred Ukrainian dead and missing really means is that Moscow is the side slowly losing the attrition fight. Eventually, this is bound to create an imbalance in combat power on one or more fronts that Ukraine can exploit to unravel the occupation one piece at a time. It doesn’t help Moscow’s situation at all that Ukraine keeps unveiling new long-range weapons systems - like a domestic Tomahawk-class cruise missile with a monthly production rate of 50 units.

Ukraine’s leaders are structuring their strategic and operational behavior. Patience, planning, and discipline are essential. Moscow has by contrast embraced the now-outdated management principle of maximum sustainable yield, subtracting as many bodies as the economy can afford to lose in exchange for a stable rate of progress across the fronts in Ukraine. One shock that upends key calculations can trigger a downward spiral: a dreaded flat spin in aviation terms. Moscow has rationalized the expenditure of infantry, shells, and vehicles to match output, with some of the first left over used to build up a thin reserve that lets Moscow bluff that it could actually invade a NATO country and not get destroyed in a matter of weeks. The grave economic consequences of shoveling so much money into the war are mounting, a fact the Muscovites are desperate to ignore but also drives their refusal to adopt saner tactics and strategy.

Putin is banking on winning through bluff what his empire will crack apart trying to take by force within another year, two at most. Hence Putin going through the motions with peace talks. On the one hand, he might yet get something for nothing, thanks to standard D.C. cowardice. On the other, it’s possible that drawing out the theater around any potential Putin-Zelensky meeting in the coming weeks could interfere with Ukrainian plans.

My take: this entire carnival was priced into Ukrainian strategy long ago. It’s the necessary last chance for Putin to come to his senses or pay the price. European style diplomacy looks soft, but in times like these isn’t.

It admittedly takes a long time to create the necessary asymmetric balance when, like Ukraine, you started from practically zero and had to build the damn airplane while flying it from 2022 onward. Only the Ukrainian leadership really knows if the next month or so is the time to push hard, but if it isn’t, then they sure are doing all the right things to set the stage for an offensive campaign without needlessly setting high expectations, as happened in 2023. Truth be told, I suspect that a lot of smart people who don’t talk to the media across Europe who have access to better information and analytical tools than I do know exactly what’s likely to happen in Ukraine this fall. The next couple of weeks of diplomatic fluttering, as leaders pretend peace without Putin’s defeat isn’t just a temporary pause and shifting of the burden to the children of today who get to be conscripted as soldiers tomorrow, is a perfect cover for Ukrainian preparations.

Some game is definitely afoot. If certain prominent sources inside and outside of Ukraine in the coming weeks begin claiming that Ukraine’s armed forces are in dramatically worse shape than has been publicly revealed and are secretly near collapse, that should be another sign that a determined maskirovka play is underway. I have a very difficult time believing that Team Zelensky is really expecting to sit down with Putin and swap territories any time soon. The way they’d have demanded that Syrskyi fight the past year and a half would have been very different. It’s also a real stretch to think that Putin would let Zelensky be seen as an equal on the global stage. Putin might be forced into that as part of his last-ditch gambit to delay Ukrainian plans and keep Trump on-side, but only so that he can then blame Zelensky for the failure of peace talks.

Zelensky would also likely face a military rebellion if he actually tried to give up the urban Donbas fortress that Putin is demanding as a precondition for peace - unless, in exchange, the return of occupied Kherson and Zaporizhzhia severed the land bridge to Crimea. This level of swap is the only one close to resembling a balanced outcome that doesn’t come off as a Muscovite victory. Though for Putin to play off a quarter of a million dead, Soviet stocks exhausted, and Ukraine militarily stronger than ever as a worthwhile exchange for two mostly ruined districts… that’s a lift, even for him.

It seems almost certain that peace talks will fail and Ukraine will work to liberate as much territory as it can before winter brings a new round of negotiations. Early stirrings of something big in the works seem evident from where I sit. The Ukrainians are intensively hitting Moscow’s rail network for the first time and going after major refineries again - exactly the targets required to start isolating and starving sections of certain fronts. The effects aren’t instant, but will add up if the campaign is sustained. Hit the circulatory system, and oxygen can’t flow freely to muscles or brain. Speaking of brains, a relentless campaign to target senior orc military leaders is also escalating, with Ukraine killing or wounding a general just about weekly. When you begin systematically targeting operational level leaders and strategic-level logistics, something substantial is usually afoot. The spectacular drone annihilation of a fuel train fairly close to the front in Zaporizhzhia may suggest an extension of the strategic strike campaign to operational-level targets.

Further, the way Ukrainian reinforcements went in and professionally put the hurt on the orcs trying to advance near Dobropillya on the Pokrovsk front - well, I’m even more certain that the Ukrainians have some powerful reserves that have been sheltering behind the expanding drone wall for several months. The tactical proficiency of the Ukrainian troops clearing the area is apparent, ground drones already leading assaults and large numbers of enemy troops killed and a few captured with very limited Ukrainian losses. Tactical skill is an essential part of the foundation for effective operations, which in turn are what accomplish strategic goals. The question that will decide any major Ukrainian counteroffensive is whether Ukraine’s working doctrine can power comprehensive, systematic offensive operations at scale.

There’s plenty of work to be done on every front, and Ukraine may test the orcs in multiple places before deciding where to make any sustained move. With Putin acting like letting Ukraine have the small chunks of Kharkiv and Sumy seized is somehow a concession, liberating them and pressing over the border may be a Ukrainian political priority. Smart money at the moment is on a counteroffensive in the Pokrovsk-Kostyantynivka area to secure both through winter. The epic assault on Volnovakha that I’d love to see may not be feasible, but I do find it interesting that once I started writing about the possibility this year the orcs - after a very long period where the area was largely ignored by orc command - started probing the exact area where I’d suggested Ukraine would build up troops. The incursion into Kharkiv around Milove and a series of small orc pushes along the Oskil near the international border are also suspiciously close to sectors I’d flagged for a potential Ukrainian push into eastern Belgorod.

The orcs are simply acting a lot warier these days than Moscow’s propaganda and the ongoing death toll suggests they need to. Front line formations are rotated off the line as soon as they lose more than about 20% of their personnel as casualties - usually their complement of disposable assault troops. The orcs are very, very afraid of being caught out again by a surprise Ukrainian counteroffensive. Their paranoia is as revealing as the slow but steady increase in the number of Ukrainian assaults conducted across the fronts. Are Ukrainian actions all building up to something bigger? Or are the Ukrainians themselves bluffing that they aren’t hanging on by a thread? The past suggests the former: but there’s always first time for everything. And the real answer may well be somewhere in the middle.

As far as the actual fighting on the fronts this week, it has certainly felt like Moscow’s advance on most fronts has struck a wall and is now recoiling in the face of aggressive Ukrainian counterattacks. But it’s too soon to be sure: it can take the orcs a week or two to reinforce a sector after suffering a bloody nose before taking a tree line here and there again. Ukrainians always have to be ready for the attacks to come again.

 

[ChloeTzang]

ZSU Organizational Reboot

Additional clues about how Ukraine’s great military reboot is culminating in the new corps taking responsibility for their assigned sectors continue to emerge. As expected, the Ukrainians are starting to group most or all of their tanks together in a single brigade assigned to each corps. Termed heavy mechanized brigades, they’ve been slowly forming up for a while, with all of Ukraine’s five former tank and about as many of the better-performing Territorial Guard brigades so flagged.

Each fields two tank and four infantry battalions, half in armored vehicles, the other armored trucks, where most line brigades now host six infantry battalions, half mechanized, half motorized. Unlike the five or six line brigades the comprise the bulk of each corps, the heavy mech brigades are probably broken into companies and attached to beef up battalions in line brigades as required. It’s a reasonable way to employ tanks, which while still extremely valuable and versatile have to be used with great care.

Assault regiments appear to be forming up in each corps as well, containing two or three battalions focused on close-quarters infantry fights. They seem designed to form the spearheads of corps-level counteroffensive operations in conjunction with the heavy mech brigades. Each corps should be able to rapidly and substantially reinforce a line brigade’s area of responsibility, giving it a dedicated trained assault force to help breach the enemy front. Line teams will secure positions bypassed by the advance guard, letting drone teams quickly deploy.

Corps are getting other essential supporting elements too - artillery, drone, and supply brigades, along with formations that handle logistics, repair, administration, and all the other organs needed to give the organism maximum autonomy. The nuances of the landscape in each corps area mean that a substantial portion of recruit training needs to take place within the corps, not at a national training center. It does appear that each corps is building up a training pipeline, which is a sign of reforms going as they should.

The corps have reportedly all been stood up: evidence of their effectiveness should be apparent soon. It is to be hoped that improved coordination at all levels can further drive down Ukrainian casualty rates and open the door to a general counteroffensive.

 

[ll74]

Fat fucking chance.

Thanks for your support

 

[ChloeTzang]

Russian-occupied Donbas is going to need a real flush after the Russians are evicted

 

[ChloeTzang]

And tonight's Russian Oil Refinery is.....

https://twitter.com/x/status/1958282766715367663

 

[Lazaran]

And tonight's Russian Oil Refinery is.....

https://twitter.com/x/status/1958282766715367663

I’m sure that was just falling debris…

Minor damage…



Slava Ukraini!!!

 

[Lazaran]

The OP (Russiaguide) is a POS Traitor (a MAGAt).

Russiaguide has been declaring Ukraine dead for THREE YEARS now, and just a few pages back in this thread, Russiaguide cited the anomalous "rapid" Russian advance in the Donetsk region as PROOF!!!… of something…



Meanwhile:

The Russian advance in Donetsk was not only blunted, but it resulted in yuuuuuge losses for the Russians in men and equipment, as the Azov brigade did what they do best (kill Russian orcs and destroy their equipment).

And Ukraine CONTINUES to inflict ACTUAL sanctions on Russia’s oil industry, military industrial complex infrastructure, and transportation sector.

Slava Ukraini!!!





Bottom line:

Russiaguide is a POS traitor (a MAGAt) that has been actively promoting Russian propaganda / talking points (just like DonOld & the MAGAt republicans in congress have been doing) here on the PB for THREE YEARS.

This is the new "ARIZONA AUDIT!!!" thread (a thread that was ALSO started by Russiaguide).



JFC

SAD!!!

We. Told. Them. So.

 

[ChloeTzang]

Ukrainian-imposed sanctions are biting....

 

[ChloeTzang]

Another S300 system way behind the Russian frontline taken out

Something exploded in Donetsk....

 

[ChloeTzang]

Russia COLLAPSES on Three Fronts At Once​

Russia's collapse is accelerating on three critical fronts. Economically, Ukrainian drone strikes have crippled over 13% of Russia's oil refining capacity, a significant blow to the state's budget and domestic fuel markets. This is compounded by an agricultural crisis that has made Russia a net food importer for the first time in six years.

Socially, war weariness is breaking through the propaganda. The Kremlin’s paranoia is on full display as it force installs a comprehensive surveillance app on citizens’ phones, while reports of vandalized military graves and a major poll showing Russian women would not wait for a partner in the military highlight the deep internal strain.

Militarily, senior Russian generals are being physically destroyed on the battlefield. The spread of Ukrainian drone attacks across multiple regions forces Russia to stretch its air defenses thin, inviting further failures. The technology gap continues to widen as Ukraine innovates, leaving Russia falling further behind. A country with an economy smaller than Italy’s is running out of time.

 

[Lazaran]

A nice little dramatization of the Ukrainian attack on that yuuuuuge Russia ammo depot, back on July 3rd, 2025:

Slava Ukraini!!!

 

[ll74]

What has Putin conceded in talks?

Answer: nothing

 

[ChloeTzang]

What has Putin conceded in talks?

Answer: nothing

Those talks are going nowhere. Lavrov has already said Putin won't meet with Zelensky and will be a no show. Trump is either (a) stupid as fuck (b) deliberately not understanding (far to subtle for Trump) or (c) in Putin's pocket


Anchorage and the follpwup wasn’t quite Munich 1938 but Team Trump try their level best to embrace their inner Chamberlain! Functional Quislings. This, my fellow Americans, is what defeat looks like if you’re seeing the situation with Russian eyes. So why do D.C. hacks keep handing Putin easy wins - and by extension, their nemesis Xi Jinping too? How is it that they can’t get it through their thick skulls that Moscow’s “progress” in Ukraine over the past few years is laughable, living evidence that Moscow’s forces are incredibly vulnerable?

Oh wait, they’ve got the most convenient excuse in the cosmos: Putin has lots of nukes. Even if it’s suicide to actually use them against America or Europe, possession of enough serves as a fantastic get-out-of-jail-free card for D.C. chickenhawks aiming to co-opt the language of peace to push surrender on Ukraine. I have to admit, Trump being this pathetic really does add credence to the rumors that Putin has serious dirt on Trump - and probably the Clintons, Bidens, and Obamas of the world too. It would explain a great deal. Great Power Politics 101 time, folks: the country of roughly 140 million people with a GDP half the size of California’s is in no way equal to one with 333 million people and around a fifth of the world’s entire economic output. Especially not when the first “power” is struggling so mightily, losing nearly as many soldiers every month as it can bring into service. No, nuclear weapons don’t automatically reset the scales, and the US has a more effective arsenal anyway, if it ever came to it.

Team Trump’s universal tell is the now-constant insistence that Trump is achieving the incredible against all odds and only leftist Democrats can possibly disagree. This generation of useless leaders - George W. Bush and Bill Clinton included - will be remembered as the architects of America’s demise through simple neglect. Each of their administrations actively enabled Putin at every turn even while pretending to uphold the pillars of American global power by bombing weaker countries left and right.

Summits like the one in Alaska - and the big allied meetup in D.C. after - are extremely important events because they force each side to commit to a particular public narrative about what happened and why. This always plays into the domestic concerns each participant is primarily speaking to - the way they tell the story says a lot about their true concerns. They reveal essential patterns in each side’s strategy that sheds important light on their future plans and how they actually view the world. Unfortunately for America, the democratic world, and Trump’s own legacy in the long run, what the silly summit in Anchorage revealed was an American administration totally out its depth, transmitting signals of chronic weakness just like Team Biden did in 2021. The outcome will prove far more catastrophic for the United States than Ukraine in the medium and long run: Trump has committed a massive unforced error that has shattered what little remained of D.C.’s leverage over America’s allies. All the smiles and glad-handing in D.C. early this week was a show: the nicer foreign leaders act to Trump in public, the more certain they are that he’s irrelevant.

It was obvious to anyone who has paid attention to Putin’s rhetoric since 2021 that this summit represented a massive win for him simply by happening at all. The entire subtext was established to call Team Trump’s bluff about being able to pressure Putin into peace on every level - and level threats. The humiliation runs far deeper than Trump’s lackadaisical efforts to get a ceasefire deal done coming to a bitter close with a shake of Putin’s chipmunk cheeks. Incidentally, gotta love how we’re back to a peace deal being the only way forward according to Trump, which was Zelensky’s original position before he had to start showing openness to a ceasefire to please Trump this spring. What a ridiculous game!

Back to the threats part of Putin’s visit: from the very beginning, Putin has used his nuclear arsenal to ward off through fear the just and necessary direct intervention Moscow’s assault on Ukraine deserves. His single biggest strategic victory since 2021 has been using non-credible threats of nuclear war to get his way in Ukraine. In his historic diatribe justifying the attempt to destroy the country issued in the summer of 2021, Putin pointedly equated Ukraine joining NATO to a nuclear strike against the Muscovite empire because of how many people this would remove from his imaginary russian world.

Nobody who pays attention to the evolution of high-level rhetoric missed the threat this argument represents, bluff though it has been proven to be. Team Biden’s behavior, from giving Putin a summit after he first moved massive forces to Ukraine’s border in 2021 straight to offering Zelensky a ride out of Kyiv when the all-out invasion happened in 2022, is 100% explained by the D.C. crowd accepting at face value Putin’s hollow threat to go nuclear if he didn’t get Ukraine. Of course, when Putin’s forces were thrown out of Kharkiv and Kherson city despite Moscow formally annexing the latter, guess what happened? Nothing nuclear, though the saber was strongly rattled. Muscovite military doctrine calls for nuclear escalation in this kind of situation - likely taking the form of a demonstration in the form of an atmospheric “test” over hostile soil - to force the start of serious negotiations under threat of the situation escalating out of control. He ultimately didn’t go there not because hollow threats to attack orc troops in Ukraine issued by certain disgraced American ex-generals named Petraeus, but because Beijing isn’t ready to treat nukes as the dominant currency of international affairs quite yet. China’s deal was simple: don’t go nuclear, and we’ll stay neutral-but-leaning-towards-Moscow.

Moscow’s nuclear bluff was further called by Ukraine’s Kursk campaign in 2024, which seized and held Muscovite home turf - another doctrinal cause for nuclear escalation - and again by Operation Spiderweb in 2025, when Ukrainian drones knocked out a third of Moscow’s nuclear-capable bomber fleet. Still, despite all that the Ukrainians have proven, the nuclear threat was still the elephant in the room in Alaska: whenever Trump talks about avoiding world war three breaking out, what he really means is someone using nukes. Nuclear use and world war three are equated in American rhetoric for a reason: this is a ready-made excuse any American leader can issue to justify backing down from a nuclear rival in a confrontation. The moment nuclear threats are invoked, generations of media mythologizing the things and the scientists who built the first ones takes over the minds of all involved, rendering rational discourse impossible.

Basically, anything nuclear has become a simple synonym for apocalypse in American public life, people trained to falsely believe that one nuke goes off and everyone dies. If you want to score the ultimate high ground in a foreign policy discussion with Americans, accuse the other side of risking nuclear war on any grounds. Putin knows this, taking care to slip in clear allusions to the possibility of nuclear conflict whenever he can - and create potential pretexts. His entire trip to Alaska was part of an elaborate nuclear threat, the pattern virtually identical to the one that preceded Putin’s assault on Ukraine. The essential narrative that sustains the Putin regime’s grip on power is that the russian world has no borders: anywhere a Russian-speaker lives is a place where Moscow has a national interest. Any place a Russian-speaker historically lived is inherently part of the russian world, to be reclaimed when the time is right. Hence Moscow’s propagandists constantly harping on the rights of Russian-speakers in Ukraine. The maneuver both places Ukraine as the oppressor and gives Moscow a license to pursue claims elsewhere.