Europe: Is compulsory military service coming back?
dw.com
dw.com
First of all, there is no viable way to actually use conscripts. Sending them overseas to die over a patch of dirt is a really bad move, as the Vietnam war has shown. Europe doesn't really want to invade anyone, so you're left with defense. So who's going to invade? The only foe even worth considering is Russia - and NATO's combined professional armies are more than a match for them. Not to mention that there are thousands of kilometers between Russia and the country considering conscription.
Second, it'd actually be a massive burden. The army suddenly has to train a bunch of unmotivated teenager every single year, which in reality ends up being a LARP session in a local forest. This drains a huge amount of resources from the professional soldiers. And all those conscripts will not contribute anything meaningful to the economy while doing so.
Sure, it might make sense if you are bordering Russia, but anything further west just isn't going to happen.
That's been shown to be true over the last year, but prior to that it was very much an open question.
Also from the perspective of "Europe" in an insular sense, it depends heavily on the large standing force and transport capability of the USA. Remember that as recently as three years ago, the occupant of the white house was publicly musing about the possibility of leaving NATO and aligning with Russia! And influential members of the minority party still wander close to that idea rhetorically.
Thanks for pointing this out… most people tend to forget this. Everything looks nice, until it doesn’t anymore.
While the president publicly said that, his actions were different. For instance, President Donald Trump instructed the United States European Command (EUCOM) to be moved from Stuttgart to Mons, near Brussels. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-germany-militar...
Sure. Certainly no one ever accused the Trump administration of well-coordinated messaging and communications strategies. Nonetheless the fact that the president was personally constrained by the needs and conventions in the rest of his administration isn't much solace to an ally trying to figure out how much reliance to place on US assistance in the future.
The somewhat awkward truth is that a large portion of the republican political base at this point have turned inward and are deliberately hostile to organizations like NATO. That's not good, but it's not something to ignore just because the existing policy apparatus (the "deep state", if you will) is holding it in check for the moment.
According to Global Affairs, support for US commitment to NATO is at a 48-year high. Quoting from https://globalaffairs.org/research/public-opinion-survey/sup...:
a) Eighty-one percent of Americans say the United States should maintain (62%) or increase (19%) its commitment to NATO, the highest level of support recorded since Chicago Council Surveys began in 1974.
b) Support for maintaining or increasing the US commitment to NATO is bipartisan, with large majorities of Democrats (90%), Independents (78%), and Republicans (75%) in support.
c) Bipartisan majorities support the admission of Finland, Sweden, Ukraine, and Georgia as new NATO members.
Are you somehow not counting Austria, Greece, and Switzerland as European?
[pedantic edit: the parent, to my interpretation, does not just argue that "introducing conscription would be a poor idea" but that "conscription is a poor idea" (whether one already has it or not); maybe it would be better off refined to the former?]
How does that square with what I read on https://www.ch.ch/en/safety-and-justice/military-service-and...
Every Swiss man is required to serve in the military or in the alternative civilian service. In most cases, the military service obligation applies from age 18 to 30.
"Switzerland has mandatory military service in the Swiss Army for all able-bodied male citizens, who are conscripted when they reach the age of majority, though women may volunteer for any position. Conscripts make up the majority of the manpower in the Swiss Armed Forces."
GP was a bit too general.
Besides, they already have military service due to historical reasons. They don't have to reintroduce it.
In most countries the military doesn’t serve “the people” but the will of politics.
If a big portion of your military IS YOUR SOCIETY (e.g., young men very happily doing a lot of stuff except bombing the shit out of a random country) - it reduces the risk of some bogus operation.
Having conscripts as an important foundation of your military can bring a lot of peace and stability…
Maybe you want to read up a bit on the Vietnam war and how the public was deceived; it isn’t just much “sending conscripts over to a overseas to die for some piece of dirt” - if conscripts see no purpose in fighting over that patch of land, maybe politicians shouldn’t either !?
I don't think there's any evidence for that one way or the other. I think you could also make a convincing argument that a professional military with a higher bar of recruits and a strong standing in law is less likely to do random shit for politicians. I'm not making that argument, just saying you need to back up such assertions.
If your military consists of your society instead of a “professionally hired military” that only answers to politicians instead of their girlfriends, mums n dads - I’d argue: less military “peace missions” abroad?
Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya - rings a bell? You think you could have send conscripts there?
“Strong standing in law” - Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya; you think the PEOPLE of these countries would agree???
That way you have a group of people with the basics. Based on that you can make further selections.
And it it should absolutely be possible to combine it with the first year of college.
One idea would be for the EU, instead of individual member states, to stand up a professional army. Then you don't have to force people and it also just might bind European countries more closely together.
From a cursory read, it doesn't seem like that stands in the way: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_army
In some remarkable circumstance that the EC proposed such a thing, and all the MEPs did think that was a good idea, there'd still have to be an EU treaty that allowed for it, because it's certainly beyond the scope of the CFSP. Said treaty would have to be ratified by the member states.
If the EU wants to have an army that serves their interests, I would consider it prudent to have the command of that army be in EU hands, instead of just handing their soldiers to the US. They can still join defensive treaties with the UK, or simply stay in NATO, but that's a different question from how the army is organized when Article 5 of NATO hasn't been triggered.
If we are to convince France to merge their army with the common EU force the EU might be forced to also protect French interests in West Africa (they are quite involved in that region still)
That is, its members transfer part of their sovereignty to the EU
Theoretically this can change at any time with the agreement of the members.
That said: even now the UK has left, there are many in the EU who don't want total integration — as you can see from other aspects like the Euro, Schengen, and the Blue Card not applying to all member states — combined with with the language barriers between almost every pair of states[0], I think this would be a long time coming even if everyone was on board.
Although, NATO is a thing and arguably does all that without any of those problems, so perhaps it's easier than I'm assuming…
[0] Austria and Germany being an obvious exception, except they're banned by treaty from ever being combined again
A joint European army does nothing to reduce US leverage; the US is still the only meaningful nuclear deterrent to Russia, and everyone in Europe knows it. But if the EU is able to credibly counter conventional threats, that's a huge bonus for the US.
While the UK and France have nuclear warheads, their numbers (225 and 290, respectively), pale in comparison with that of Russia (5889) and the US (5244).
Also, the UK's force is sea based and France's is land and air based, both Russia and the US have a nuclear triad:
three-pronged military force structure that consists of land-launched nuclear missiles, nuclear-missile-armed submarines, and strategic aircraft with nuclear bombs and missiles.[1] Specifically, these components are land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs), and strategic bombers. The purpose of having this three-branched nuclear capability is to significantly reduce the possibility that an enemy could destroy all of a nation's nuclear forces in a first-strike attack. This, in turn, ensures a credible threat of a second strike, and thus increases a nation's nuclear deterrence.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_states_with_nuclear_we...
Around 90% of the non-rural Russian population is in their most populous 100 cities. Taking those out would pretty effectively destroy Russia as a country.
Even if the UK managed to launch successfully without those systems being taken down (and there will be a missile failure rate), Russia has sophisticated air defenses, and there will be a substantial loss rate. Only a small fraction of those warheads will hit.
And those are not megaton warheads. These are small nuclear weapons meant for battlefield use. What's more, the UK is simply not going to go for a genocide; they're going to hit military assets, which are far more spread out.
So while the UK can deter from conventional attacks on itself, it's by no means a MAD scenario. They do not really have a shield to extend across eastern europe the way the US does.
I am all for a professional EU army but forcing - let's face it - young men to join, even for an year, doesn't sit well with me.
There are some calls for bringing back military service in some countries. I'm not sure that's needed or a good idea. The reason most European armies are not in great shape is not a lack of people but years of budget cuts and mismanagement. That would be because they don't actually do a whole lot of fighting normally. They defend without ever being attacked and there is the odd mission abroad where some countries send maybe thousands of troops at best. I don't see that change any time soon. And that's a good thing. I count myself lucky to not have been exposed to major wars close to where I live. And I live in the middle of Berlin. Buildings here still have scars from WW II. At least the few that survived that.
The most credible threat on our eastern border was the Russian army. And courtesy of their own ineptness, they seem to be hard at work reducing that threat by expending most of their officers and usable equipment in the Ukraine. It doesn't look like they are recovering soon.
Also, there is the point of this being a remarkably old school conflict. The Russians tactics have barely evolved since the 1940s. They seem unable to use their airforce effectively, their navy is not a factor either. Mostly they are just launching wave after wave of cannon fodder at their enemies. Brutal and it's not working great for them judging from the recent news.
Most modern conflicts are very different. Relatively poorly trained conscripts don't add a lot of value in such conflicts. Europe needs lots of rockets, drones, etc. Keep the fight far away from its borders.
A bigger risk would be an armed uprise within our borders. For that reason getting a lot of small countries excited about building out their armies is not a great idea. I'm old enough to remember the Bosnian war and I've visited Mostar a few years ago. Political populism and armies are not a great mix. A lot of blood got spilled in Europe that proves that.
On the other hand, it could get very awkward if we had another situation like we had in 2002/2003 when the US were asking other countries for support in their war on Iraq. Europe was deeply divided - at least at the leadership level - in this matter. With a unified EU military, countries would have to give up a large amount of sovereignty. And there is already a fair amount of hostility towards the EU for taking sovereignty away from member states, remember Brexit.
Personally, I think it would be a good idea if all countries could agree to give up their own national military. But I don't think it will happen. At most, I could see countries agreeing to move more authority to the NATO.
Last but not least, there are more than 25 languages being spoken in the EU. We'd have to agree on one language being the lingua franca in a unified military if we want it to work.
If you can't disagree and commit, how unified are you really?
For one it instills in young people a sense of duty and direction and also simply physical fitness which many struggle with these days, in Germany an important aspect was always to have civilian supervision in the military ('citizen in uniform') not a sort of separated, private army. A lot of people in the army I talked to have noted that nowadays a lot of people who sign up are just people with limited job prospects. An army of the unemployed is ethically awful. National service should not be pushed on people who do it desperate for a paycheck. Everyone in the country benefits from its defense, so nobody should be able to skip out. I admire the culture of say Israel, Finland, Norway or Switzerland, small countries where this has always been on the mind of people.
As a side note in terms of fitness, in the US, the number eligible people is rather low due to the number of constrains the US military places on fitness, weight, tattoos, mental health etc. The number of people that could actually fight it everyone were called up that's within the age bracket is somewhere in the teens in terms of percentage. Unsure where that stands in Europe, but it would be a large roadbump if the draft were to be reimplemented.
They do, desperately so. There is a reason we have an entire internet economy of influencers and hucksters targeting in particular disoriented young men. They're pretty much begging for someone to provide meaning, discipline, comradery the kind of which traditionally you experience in for example military service and instead we leave them to Andrew Tate.
We have huge issues with young people delaying adulthood, not having structure, feeling useless and so on. Demanding someone serve their country is to take them seriously, give them responsibility and to provide them with a good reason to cultivate character.
Regarding self-selection and career prospects: We went to a military fair on a school trip in the 90s. There was an enlistment pitch, too, and even then (conscription had not yet been paused), they seemed to target those who didn't know what they wanted to do with their lives. (Everyone in my class was technically headed for tertiary education eligibility, so unemployment was a far-away concern.)
But he was not wrong that there's a fundamental difference in democratic outlook between someone who risks their life (even hypothetically) for their country and someone who does not.
If you can vote to spend a life, even indirectly, you should have some skin in that game too.
There is some truth to the idea that the places where conscription really works are where politics is not polarized by age.
The ones who survive may - perhaps - be useful to everyone else.
> But if you want to serve and I can’t talk you out of it, then we have to take you, because that’s your constitutional right. It says that everybody, male or female, shall have his born right to pay his service and assume full citizenship—but the facts are that we are getting hard pushed to find things for all the volunteers to do that aren’t just glorified K.P. You can’t all be real military men; we don’t need that many and most of the volunteers aren’t number-one soldier material anyhow. Got any idea what it takes to make a soldier?” ... we’ve had to think up a whole list of dirty, nasty, dangerous jobs that will either run ’em home with their — tails between their legs and their terms uncompleted . . . or at least make them remember for the rest of their lives that their citizenship is valuable to them because they’ve paid a high price for it.
and from https://archive.org/details/starshiptroopers0000robe_r5e7/pa... :
> if you came in here in a wheel chair and blind in both eyes and were silly enough to insist on enrolling, they would find some- thing silly enough to match. Counting the fuzz on a caterpillar by touch, maybe. The only way you can fail is by having the: psychiatrists decide that you are not able to understand the oath.”
Embassy staff and Peace Corp members both risk their lives (even hypothetically) for their country. Anglican missionaries risk their lives (even hypothetically) for the state, under the authority of the state's established religion. The nurses in US federal-run hospitals, nurses risk their lives doing dirty, nasty, dangerous jobs that definitely risk their lives.
All of them would be citizens, right?
That said, Heinlein magically waived corruption away. Who gets to decide if a candidate should serve as, say, a combat pilot in the National Guard rather than be deployed overseas as an infantryman? And is it possible to pull strings so a powerful politician's son gets preferable treatment?
Bear also in mind that many people enter the military not to risk their life but to get, for example, college money or training for a career. They risk their life in the same way that a lumberjack does - death is a calculated risk, and not, as Heinlein argues, evidence that the soldier has the "emotional conviction that the whole is greater than the part . . . and that the part should be humbly proud to sacrifice itself that the whole may live."
Remember, that book also says the only way to train children is to beat them - a brutal practice I wish were prohibited in the US as it is in 65 other countries. https://endcorporalpunishment.org/countdown/
> If you can vote to spend a life, even indirectly, you should have some skin in that game too.
The US has been at war for nearly its history, and glorified war to boot. Heinlein trained to be a military officer. What would happen if the US fought no wars? What happens if there is not enough skin to lose? If there are no enemies to fight?
More specifically, how would that work in Iceland? No standing army, a Coast Guard with three ships and four aircraft, the ICRU with "200 people, of whom about 30 are active at any given time" says Wikipedia.
Do the ~10,000 members of the Icelandic Association for Search and Rescue have enough skin in the game that they should be allowed to vote?
You have a bunch of unmotivated people that don't want to be there. You have to house them, feed them, train them for what, 3, 6, 12 months? Seems like a lot of money. How long will that training last for? How soon will you need retraining to be even considered marginally useful? Isn't it better to spend that money on professional soldiers?
To my mind mandatory service doesn't help at all - the German military for example needs more soldiers, but more importantly needs to be run competently by the government since it's had well-known problems for years at this point (any analysis on what would happen if they were actually suddenly needed would find they'd be pretty likely to look an awful lot like the Russians in terms of equipment availability, but for entirely stupid reasons - "just in time" equipment procurement).
Refreshing is a helluva lot easier than training, when you're simultaneously fighting an active conflict.
Those arguments don't have anything to do with conscription. You could just as well achieve the same with mandatory education, or mandatory pick-trash-up-in-the-forests.
They're getting education in a different set of skills, and additional life experiences; some of which may actually be transferrable outside the military context.
I don't see the same objection to students deciding to take a gap-year to backpack around Southeast Asia.
I am just guessing of course
It is a lot of money. National defense of some sort is also, mostly necessary for independent countries.
As for why conscription vs professional soldiers, it depends on the threat model. If you're Finland and want to be able to hold off Russia, a professional army isn't going to cut it. Mass mobilization is the only thing that has a chance of working.
Of course, you could always argue that that's what allies are for. But the problem with allies is that they don't always come through when and how you want them to.
Yes, I agree, in cases like this, sure. In general however I think that compulsory training is more wasteful than usual.
> Of course, you could always argue that that's what allies are for. But the problem with allies is that they don't always come through when and how you want them to.
Being Polish that rings true. Also, if every ally in an alliance thinks that…
But most of Europe doesn't have a credible threat.
Norway and Sweden have conscription for both men and women.
Israel has it for Jews, but not Christians, Muslims, Druze, and Circassians.
Germany needs a competent army and non-sabotaging government supervision. Conscripts are not a replacement for competency. Such talk is little more than the a scapegoat measure to shift blame from those responsible.
- "Second, it'd actually be a massive burden. The army suddenly has to train a bunch of unmotivated teenager every single year, which in reality ends up being a LARP session in a local forest. This drains a huge amount of resources from the professional soldiers. And all those conscripts will not contribute anything meaningful to the economy while doing so." posted by crote at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36281486
- "I've always thought of those compulsory military training schemes as a little silly. You have a bunch of unmotivated people that don't want to be there. You have to house them, feed them, train them for what, 3, 6, 12 months? Seems like a lot of money. How long will that training last for? How soon will you need retraining to be even considered marginally useful? Isn't it better to spend that money on professional soldiers?" posted by mszcz at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36281419
Such European countries should rather attempt to train a voluntary partisan army for defense. I do believe that there are many people who would like to learn how to use a firearms (exacerbated by the fact that many European countries have rather strict firearm laws) and get military skills in courses that span over multiple weekends.
The people who would voluntarily attend such courses tend to be highly motivated.
The people that this makes me think of the most are also the ones that I least want to be given military training.
https://preview.redd.it/of-europeans-who-would-fight-for-the...
There's a clear table linked at the bottom.
https://ruotuvaki.fi/-/maanpuolustustiedotuksen-suunnitteluk...
It's not a surprise that in Eastern Europe the percentage is significantly higher, because there it means "fight against an authoritarian invader who will strip us of our freedoms and will destroy much of what our country stands for".
In Western Europe it means ... what exactly? There are no immediate obvious threats and it's nothing more than a vague expression of patriotism lacking any sort of concrete meaning.
I bet you'd get very different answers with "if Russia would invade your country, then would you be willing to serve in the army to defend it?" And even that would be biased, because such a hypothetical question comes off as very different if it's not all that hypothetical.
Sorry, I don't quite understand – what do you mean, “biased”? Are you saying it should be "if Russia would invade your country...”, or what? If so, then that's silly. Asking the question in the shape of what might happen in stead of what with overwhelming likelyhood won't isn't “bias”, it's just common sense. Or realism, if you will.
But maybe you meant some other kind of “bias”?
Let’s be mindful that Russia wanted to ascend to NATO differently to everyone else.
This is against NATOs policy that everyone joins in the same way.
Russia then abandoned its application when they where told to apply like everyone else.
Russia, not NATO rejected that relationship.
> Again, Putin accepted implementation of Minsk 1 and 2 but Nato insist of creating war path.
Russia also signed the Budapest Memorandum that didn’t stop them from invading.
Russia only follows international agreements when it favours them and flagrantly breaks them when it wants to.
> Vigilantee assassination maybe illegal but morally it is right. Sometime doing the right thing is hard but have to for tge good of many.
I agree someone must kill Putin before he escalates this to world war 3, the new fascist beast with its Z swastika must be stopped in time before it makes things worse.
We mustn’t let the new Hitler take his Sudetenland.
Since NATO is mostly defence only, foreign indirect conflicts can be handled by professional military, aka not drafted.
If indirect conflicts create massive migrations (a type of war), the professional military may not be enough, and drafted military may be required to deal with the local "troubles" created by those massive migrations.
Some psychos say to eat the bullet: uk or/and france go nuke russia, without the involvement of the usa: nuclear annihilation of russia, france and/or uk. Then the huge us army goes cleanup russia (remove all remaining nukes), and the remains of uk/france would be taken over by the EU. Ofc, no more uk or/and france, but a future without the nukes from russia for the humanity.
To kill (or hurt) other human beings to protect "your" land or "your" loved ones baffles me. Yes, I love my loved ones (wow) but that doesn't mean I'm willing to kill people who are 99.99999% similar to my loved ones just because the politicians that manage the countries we happen to live in decide so.
We think that because we can send probes the the outer space or because we can do calculus we are so intelligent. We are still just monkeys who get mad when other monkeys say/do something to us that we don't like.
Russia saw Ukraine as militarily weak, but in control over strategic territory that it wanted to capture.
It's a simple calculus - no amount of talking would have prevented this war.
In principle few people would of course disagree with this, but this is a naïve idealistic teenager take. The reality is that without an army that's willing to actually fight you will be taken advantage of sooner or later. Maybe at some point in the future when more of the world shared humanistic ideals that will be different, but that's not the situation today.
Sardonic congratulations to the fine minds at NATO for manoeuvring us towards this outcome. Anyone who feels optimistic as all these armies limber up is beyond an idiot. As a culture we've missed several decades of opportunities to de-fuse this situation.
I hope all this is a short spark that goes away.
* Investment in Russia post-USSR collapse to replicate what happened in Germany after WWII.
* Not expanding NATO towards Moscow in the 1990s-2010s (including the discovery that Ukraine is de-facto partially under the NATO security umbrella).
* Working to bring Russia into a security alliance targeted at China.
* The US not adopting a policy of prolonging the war in Ukraine to bleed out the Russian military. It should have been treated like Iraq 2.0.
But it is people like Victoria Nuland who have been influencing policy in the region so I expect there are a lot of other opportunities that have been missed. She's part of the cadre that should have been working somewhere outside foreign policy (ideally, McDonalds or Walmart) following the Iraq war.
Allied powers occupied Germany which made sure that Germany won't simply use that money to re-arm for the next war. No control like that existed for Russia.
> Not expanding NATO towards Moscow in the 1990s-2010s
That amounts to letting Russia recollect its empire piece by piece. The idea that Russia would just like that lose its imperialism, if only we were nicer to them, is naive.
Even then, why should we assume that letting Russia recollect its empire would Russia make a West's friend? That's basically cold war 2.0.
> The US not adopting a policy of prolonging the war in Ukraine to bleed out the Russian military.
I guess we all wish Ukraine/US/West could expulse Russia out of Ukraine outright, but that does not seem possible. I don't think US is prolonging the war intentionally, but simply because of real constraints.
I mean; look at China? The US didn't need to occupy them. They're much worse than the Russians when you look at the organisation of their political class - trigger that sort of prosperity in Russia and we'd probably be seeing them just bunkered down waiting for Siberia to thaw through global warming. It'd certainly have allayed their fears about an eventual US attack if the US had been investing in their success instead of spending the last few decades preparing a military response.
> The idea that Russia would just like that lose its imperialism, if only we were nicer to them, is naive.
Russia literally dismantled their own empire in 1990. They aren't a top-10 power. They aren't going to reclaim the USSR; they can barely even reclaim the Donbass. Even without US interference they couldn't plausibly fight Poland or the Nordics without being ruined. Norway, population the size of a large city, has an economy within spitting distance of the economy of all of Russia!
People can pretend that Russia is an imperialist power, or driven by imperialist ambition, or whatever but that just casts doubt on all the other propaganda being thrown about. They can't plausibly enact any sort of imperialist vision.
> I don't think US is prolonging the war intentionally, but simply because of real constraints.
Well, think what you will but the US has done nothing to end the war. They could negotiate and end to all this without too much effort.
Russia during late 2000s and early 2010s has been more prosperous than ever, yet Crimea invasion and annexation, Donbas invasion happened. No, you can't undo imperialism through money. You can make it more powerful with money, though.
> Russia literally dismantled their own empire in 1990.
No, it certainly wasn't "Russia", only some of its ruling class making that decision under pressure. A historical aberration.
Even then there was kicking and screaming, with violent suppression in Baltics. Yeltsin never let go of imperialism either with keeping Moldova and Georgia unstable and talking about unification with Ukraine and Belarus (Russia was too weak to do anything about that, though, so all in friendly manners for now).
> They aren't a top-10 power. They aren't going to reclaim the USSR; they can barely even reclaim the Donbass.
Militarily they of course are. They aren't going to reclaim the USSR, mainly because some of the countries in questions are already off limits as members of NATO. I'm pretty sure that if Baltic States were not members of NATO, they wouldn't be sovereign nations at this point of time.
> They can't plausibly enact any sort of imperialist vision.
Have you watched Russian media recently?
> They could negotiate and end to all this without too much effort.
As usual, where "negotiations" means "surrender".
A quarter of Ukraine's population has decamped, now lives in Russia or died, 15% of what was their their land in 2010 is now in Russian hands, their infrastructure is slowly being pulverised and their allies plan on having them die gloriously to achieve geopolitical objectives. If a generation of young men haven't been killed off yet they'll get there at this rate. The last 6 months has achieved the grisly fall of Bakhmut and not much more that I recall. Lots of bodies. There are nukes being set up in Belarus pointed at Kyiv and/or the rest of Europe. And pouring weapons into one of the most corrupt countries in Europe is also going to have repercussions, somehow.
They can keep fighting or they can stop fighting. Fighting isn't working out very well. Life is unfair.
To start, the EU loan deal in late 2012 and the CIA-backed coup d'etat known as "Euromaidan" in 2013, could/should have played out differently. Instead it's evident that key players like Victoria Nuland, the CIA / Imperialistic Neo-con agenda played a significant role in exacerbating tensions during that time, ultimately leading to the destabilization of the country.
Secondary, Ukraine should have ceded the eastern territories as "independent states" in 2015 post the Minsk agreements.
Those events have lead to the "special military operation" in 2022, as they disregard the clearly defined "red line" of NATO being in Ukraine which was set by Putin a long time ago.
To defuse things now though? (It's too late now, the Military industrial complex has their pound of flesh.) Have Ukraine exist freely, similar to Finland before it joined NATO. This would respect Ukraine's sovereignty and ensure its independence without it being a vassal to geopolitical alliances.
Still the easiest and most foolproof way to identify a Putler propagandist: They always mislabel the EuroMaidan revolution as a “coup”.
Oh well, I suppose one oughta be grateful to them for making it so easy.
From Russia of course.
1) eventually, there will be a madman in charge of the nukes. Only a matter of time. As long as there are nukes, I believe they will eventually be used.
2) another option to consider. MAD assumes the 1st strike party will also be annihilated. Perhaps someone will figure out a way to use their nukes first while somehow preventing a counter strike. “Unknown unknowns“.
3) technical malfunction
As for massive, world ending attack - hopefully over the time all those treaties, agreements and monitoring that were in place before this attack on Ukraine will be restored over the time and improved.