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Comment by axiosgunnar | Hacker News Reader

Yes. (nobody will freeze to death btw)

And the reasoning is as follows:

The actually morally necessary step is to establish a no-fly zone above Ukraine, enforced by force with NATO fighter jets and anti-aircraft systems.

People (possibly rightfully) consider that this could lead to a WW3, possibly escalating into the usage of nuclear weapons.

So far so good.

So the bargain we do is basically "Ukraine, we would do everything for you, except for starting WW3, which you hopefully understand!".

Really? Everything? Then quit Russian gas cold turkey! No matter how bad it will be (possibly fairly bad, I admit), it will still be less than WW3, which we bargain is the only thing that we don't want, everything else we would do for Ukraine.

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Can anybody put this into better words??

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> The actually morally necessary step is to establish a no-fly zone above Ukraine, enforced by force with NATO fighter jets and anti-aircraft systems.

The "total NFZ over Ukraine" idea will definitely lead to a direct war with Russia because it essentially requires striking AA sites within Russia and Belarus.

The only NFZ scenario that's plausible is a partial NFZ with a sufficiently large buffer zone that it does not overlap with Russian AA on Russian soil. Which puts Kyiv outside the NFZ, btw.

I’ll try:

“Don’t trip the most obvious trigger for ww3 until all avenues for sanctions, embargoes, and boycotts have been exhausted. This obviously includes stopping gas purchases from Russia.”

But as D’s A, I would wonder where this stops. Should US be opening domestic production with gusto? Should Germany demand oil from Middle East with threats of soft and hard power? Shall they buy from Iran, Russia’s friend? Shall they embargo China, who presumably still buys fossil fuels from Russia, and every other customer of Russia?

Assume Germany’s need for gas is not elastic - they can’t simply endure with less. To what lengths shall they go to avoid Russian gas?

Once Russia is economically desperate, will ww3 be triggered anyway?

I don’t know the answers to these questions, but I do wonder about them.

> nobody will freeze to death btw)

Ceaușescu was deposed (and very rapidly shot at the wall) also because of the fact we, Romanians, were freezing in our very homes. That and the food rationing.

I believe the plan is to let Russia fire first, and escalate progressively until a) Russia wisely retreats, or b) Moscow is fallen, while carefully rendering nuclear options seem undesirable. That except the last part was how it went last time for us.

Agreed. In other words, the EU and US are at war with Russia by all means except direct fire. In a war, citizens will have to make sacrifices. This may include painful economic sacrifices.

Also, making sacrifices may looks good for a few days, but it will sure cause massive problem after that. And, the funny thing is many people indulge in so much luxury, I don't think it is even possible.

I didn't sign up for a war

Take that up with the Russian president.

Six million Jews didn't sign up for a war either.

Nor did everybody on the 'allied' side in WWII.

Nor did millions of Koreans, Vietnamese, Iraqis, Afghanis and so on.

Millions of Ukrainians did not sign up for it.

In fact: almost nobody except for the aggressors signed up for a war and even there that's debatable, usually it's only a few people at the top and then 100's of enablers and thousands to millions of conscripts, who didn't sign up for it either.

But that doesn't mean that you won't end up in a war. The question is how much control you will have over the location of the battlefield. That's why the Americans had this 'fight them over there rather than here' doctrine going. Which given their lack of proximity always was a bit of misdirection, but that doesn't mean that the idea by itself does not have merit.

Most people involved in wars did not sign up for them, from my reading of history

A half-hearted proxy war, perhaps. It’s hard to ask US citizens to make real sacrifices (who, beyond symbolism and sympathy, probably don’t give a practical shit about Ukraine - specifically, very few are interested in sending family members to die in Ukraine).

Not sure how my 25 cent analysis of US would translate to Germany, but demands on citizens should probably not get too out of sync with the level of existential threat the citizens perceive. If there’s a perception problem, fix that and then make the demands for sacrifice.

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