Hacker News Reader

Comment by ericmay | Hacker News Reader

Escalation from picking on Ukraine to using nuclear weapons is an escalator ladder that doesn’t make sense with respect to projecting strength - because utilization means direct war with the United States, which Russia will decisively lose. Once they use a nuclear weapon there is nothing else left to escalate. All the cards have been played.

Their only action would then be to use more nuclear weapons and they just aren’t going to do that because they don’t want to end the world.

View on HN

> because utilization means direct war with the United States, which Russia will decisively lose.

Not necessarily, Russia's successful intelligence efforts for regime change in the US may have nullified US response.

Nah that’s just marketing. The US hasn’t fundamentally changed anything with respect to Ukraine. Even Trump can’t, and hasn’t changed that.

Did you watch the same oval office event I did? The national rhetoric has absolutely changed. The talk of mineral "deals" instead of values and realpolitik is also a clear change. We are literally experiencing a purge of the old guard for replacement with loyalists throughout the US government bureaucracy, and once there are loyalists in every position of enforcement, the actions can be changed to match the rhetoric change, assuming they already haven't.

No because I don’t waste my time watching press releases like that. If you’re watching those videos and thinking something has changed, you’re the target audience and the marketing was successful. Those are for entertainment purposes only.

Instead, find clear instances where the US is doing things like no longer sending Patriot missile launchers and missiles to Ukraine. [1]

[1] https://www.yahoo.com/news/us-working-allies-deliveries-patr...

Right now you are wearing ignorance like a shield. You are proud of not watching a "manipulative press release."

Watch it, then try saying nothing has changed. You seem like someone with a strong world view that's strong because you reject anything that challenges it.

> the United States is working closely with NATO allies that possess a certain number of Patriot air defence systems to encourage them to transfer them to Ukraine.

Oh, that's real brave, yeah. Did you even read that before you linked it?

Don't have a horse in this race, but I don't understand your quote, it does back OP claims.

These allies need agreement from the US government to transfer these systems to Ukraine. Some like Israel, probably transferred these to Ukraine in exchange for other US systems like THAAD

GP implies that the US is still sending patriots to Ukraine. It is not, as explicitly stated in the article. Facilitating other people sending them is not the same thing, so their post is nonsense, just a half-assed attempt to bring in a "citation". Not that any of that is even a good measure for the way US's posture toward Ukraine has shifted.

Andrew - the United States itself has a limited number of Patriot missile batteries and missiles available. The United States has been deploying more and more missile defense assets, including Patriot missile launchers and/or missiles, to the Asia Pacific region (Japan, Guam, Philippines, etc.) because of the very real possibility of a direct war with China over Taiwan.

The reason the United States is asking allies in Europe to relocate their Patriot missile batteries to Ukraine is because Ukraine has an immediate defensive need. The countries that are not the United States and not in the Pacific don't have an immediate need for these missile batteries. Either they get them from a US NATO ally (under the US security guarantee) or they don't get them at all - dealer's choice. If the US "abandoned Ukraine" or policy somehow fundamentally shifted, we wouldn't see things like this take place.

The United States has to facilitate the movement of materials and equipment like this because the US is the country that actually has the power to defend NATO allies (France, UK, Poland, etc. can as well but they need the US) so it's up to the US to understand global security needs and make determinations of where assets can be moved or repurposed. In this sense, the US is sending the Patriot launchers to Ukraine.

The person responding to me was making baseless claims about the US withdrawing support. I don't think anything has fundamentally changed. You can read responses for yourself where people state things like the US stopped intelligence sharing which isn't true.

If you want to make a claim that my post is nonsense and my citation, which was just a simple example in a reply to someone who didn't provide any citations of their own, was "half-assed" why don't you bring your own original thoughts and citations and articles and we can discuss them instead of just pointlessly criticizing the character of what I wrote instead of what I actually wrote?

I think that's overly semantic, and if the US government is actively pressuring governments (Israel) to transfer batteries, and is doing refurbishing of those batteries, then that's a good evidence of some policy.

I do agree that there was a shift in US policy towards Ukraine with the new administration. However, Russia being Russia, it looks like it is all going back to the previous policy

> overly semantic

I mean, kinda, but there's no other way to address a weird implication like they posted. That's another reason it was a dumb point.

> The US hasn’t fundamentally changed anything with respect to Ukraine.

At a minimum, the US stopped giving targeting intel to Ukraine; that itself is a pretty fundamental change.

US stopped sharing intel not because USA loves Russia.

only done to maintain plausable deniability that USA is not an active party of a conflict

US stopped sharing intel with Ukraine on Mar 5th and restarted it on Mar 11th.

Professionals in the field are not so sure, and any understanding of the history of warfare reveals that undesireable wars often cannot be stopped by the parties if they get into the wrong situations.

Russian doctrine now includes the use of nuclear weapons (look up 'escalate to de-escalate'), and Russia has threatened their use.

The US government and others have taken the risk very seriously and Ukraine has restrained itself from doing things that might provoke a Russia-NATO war.

You are also omitting the Russian perspective, which sees NATO in Ukraine as potentially existential.

They say the see NATO in Ukraine as potentially existential but it mostly seems BS. I mean why is having a defensive alliance in Ukraine more existential than having it in Latvia, Estonia, Finland and Norway which also border Russia?

I think it's more an excuse to try to restore their empire.

To be fair they also say that about the Baltics and Poland.

Of course it is.

Russia huffed and puffed about Finland or Sweden joining NATO to be a red line and waving the nuke stick.

You have no idea what you're talking about; are you sure you want to risk nuclear war on the basis of your knowledge? It's far to dangerous to trust to hot takes on HN. I would listen to the experts.

This is how wars actually start - ignorant people, ignorant publics, demanding escalatory actions.

> why is having a defensive alliance in Ukraine more existential than having it in Latvia, Estonia, Finland and Norway which also border Russia?

The answer is pretty obvious. The Baltic states joined NATO when the relationship with Russia wasn't adversarial. Also, Russia wasn't at war with them.

As far as I know no one is making nuclear decisions on the basis of my HN posts. I still think Russia is full of it.

A lot of wars start because Russia decides it wants to start them to grab some neighbors stuff including WW2 where they allied with Hitler to get half of Poland.

> As far as I know no one is making nuclear decisions on the basis of my HN posts.

You are in a democratic society where public opinion has a strong effect and where we influence each other. Also, if you don't take your posts seriously, why should anyone else?

Russian propaganda and leaders surely tried to drive that idea forward from day-one of the war. However, three years later, I think we can summarize they highly miscalculated that the west would not intervene because of fear of nuclear war.

NATO hasn't intervened for that reason. There are no NATO troops in Ukraine.

Which "Professionals"? Most "military analysts" are literally just former soldiers trading on fake prestige. So which professionals are you getting your ideology from? Were they the same professionals who insisted that US intel was wrong and there's no way the 300k soldiers amassing on Ukraine's border were part of an invasion literally days before they invaded?

>Russian doctrine now includes the use of nuclear weapons (look up 'escalate to de-escalate'), and Russia has threatened their use.

Russian doctrine has always included first strike possibility, and has threatened nuclear war constantly since they ran out of legitimate threats. But these have all been public threats, not actual threats. The intention is to get a country's citizens to reduce their support for Ukraine, not genuinely warn a country's leaders of possible escalation risk.

The day that Russia ACTUALLY goes "no seriously, we will nuke if you do that", average citizens will not hear it. Diplomacy is not conducted through CNN.

> Most "military analysts" are literally just former soldiers trading on fake prestige.

What is fake about it if they are actually former soldiers who have practiced in this field? Who are you and why should anyone listen to you? As far as I can tell, you are just some commenter on the Internet.

> ideology

I see - you mean to ridicule everyone and hope something sticks. Your ideas are similarly ignorant.

Maybe you should learn what you are talking about. It's a serious subject.

I don't see anyone risking a global nuclear exchange by intervening in Ukraine if the Russians use nukes. I also think the average person probably underestimates how personal this is for the Russians. It's akin to the US fighting a war in Canada over resources, and what they believe to be an unacceptable military encroachment by an old enemy. This is probably the closest we've been to nuclear weapons being used since the Cuban missile crisis, maybe even since the second world war.

Didn't the US threaten to nuke Russia over China in the 60s because Russia was contemplating it?

That also wont be necessary. If Russia used a nuke, India and China would stop trading with Russia after which the Russian economy would collapse in months.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com