If you want to achieve victory, you must understand your enemy as well as yourself. The Russian attitude towards NATO expansion into Ukraine can be roughly viewed from an American perspective as well equivalent as the old Warsaw Pact attempting to bring Mexico into their treaty. Or, at least, this is part of the explanation used to frame it as an ‘existential threat’ for Russia. This, combined with a somewhat precarious economy based largely on fossil fuel exports and the fact that in some sense Putin serves at the pleasure of the group of oligarchs, and only as long as they can earn. This combo of circumstance makes it pretty easy to guess at how we got here, and frankly how easy it was to provoke. Unfortunately for Putin, and fortunate for pretty much everybody else, at this point, it appears that outside of complete and total victory and annexation of Ukraine, it looks like he loses no matter what.

Putin is a ham-fisted dictator, and the world will be better off without him, but his motivations here aren’t mysterious.

Russia _hates_ that Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia are all part of NATO.

But when they were accepted Putin didn't feel strong enough to do anything about it.

Russia has been advancing it's "sphere of influence" political theory, whereby independent countries with that "sphere of influence" don't get the right to make their own alliances. That "sphere of influence" includes all Eastern European countries that border on Russia at least.

It hasn't been widely reported on, but the initial demand that led to this war was that NATO withdraw all infrastructure install in post 1997 expansions:

Russia published two lists of demands — for Washington and for NATO — the latter calling for the removal of all NATO military infrastructure installed in Eastern European countries after 1997, effectively attempting to rework the consequences of the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991, which left Russia weakened for years.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/12/17/ukraine-russ...

From what I understand of world politics, what is viewed by one as defensive is often viewed by another as offensive. Eg Monroe doctrine.

It makes more sense when examining their history. This is probably a decent place to start: https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/10/ru...

Don't forget Norway.

They are literally doing total war without provocation. The theoretical threat of NATO has not been a part of this conflict at all. Treating that imagined threat as if it’s equivalent to the very real war is navel gazing excuse for a mass murdering fascist.

A large ecological disaster from an open air uncontrolled nuclear power plant fire would be a European wide concern. The results could be considered a WMD.

The Russian government has already claimed that Ukraine is seeking nuclear weapons with US aid [0]. If it doesn't find a way to fit it's attack on, the fire at, and any resulting radiation release from the plant into that narrative with massaged details that make it both a heroic action by Russia and a dastardly one by Ukraine compounded by a Ukrainian propaganda effort to blame it on Russia...well, they aren't following the propaganda style they have been this whole invasion.

[0] https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wsj.com/amp/articles/ukrain...

Reactors can be shut down gracefully. The generated power can be shunted to ground from the turbines without risk.

> I don’t know what would happen to a nuclear power plant operating without a load to take the generated power.

The same as any other power plant: the generator is automatically shut down by its safety systems (if it didn't shut down, the generator would overspeed and violently break apart). Once the generator shuts down, the safety systems for the reactor itself should either automatically shut down the reactor too, or somehow bypass the steam to the generator and reduce power to idle (I thought they would always shut down, but recently there was a failure on the generator of the nuclear power plant near where I live, and the reactor went to idle instead of shutting down, so it seems nuclear power plants have this mode too).

The issue is what happens after a shutdown; as seen at Fukushima, the cooling pumps in the reactor need external power for a couple of days until the decay heat reduces enough that passive cooling is sufficient. Without power from the outside, the emergency generators take over; if these are damaged or out of fuel, and backup generators can't be brought by truck from outside after a couple of hours, disaster happens.

The seem to be like £100 on amazon.

?

It’s a Geiger counter. It’s cheaper than having an oscilloscope, which wouldn’t be “understated” either.