What a waste of life. Why hasn’t someone taken out Putin, is it really that hard? It can’t possibly be that hard for a state.
Especially one as shrewd as Putin. Especially when you're expecting the EU to do it. Not sure why this is a surprise.
The world is not an action film.
Never mind that they tried a month ago with the drone attacks.
How would this work exactly? The most protected person in the world, thousands of km from hostile borders, in the city with the world best AD surrounded, by bureaucrats who, if anything, think Putin is too soft on the West.
Ppl behave as if Russia isn't sitting on the world's conventional weapons cache, and largest weapons production capability.
Or that Ukraine wasn't sitting on the second largest cache of conventional weapons, particularly Soviet era AD.
At a certain point we have to understand that Putin is about the most pro-Western person left in Russia.
Appearing more sane than Putin while simultaneously being in a position to plausibly serve as Putin's successor is likely to be fatal.
For whatever reason Putin is the most pro-West guy in the West, he remains the most pro-West guy in the West.
Off him and you get a very trigger happy replacement.
The problem is that Russia is the one surviving major imperialist state (as in annexing land) of the four that existed in the 1930s. We defeated the other three and rebuilt their constitutions, but we didn't have the manpower or the will to do this to Russia as well.
And so, Russia continued in its imperialist tradition: Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Chechnya, Georgia, Ukraine, and next Moldova and Lithuania if they're not stopped.
The West naively believed that commerce would tame Russia, but an imperialist is never satisfied with riches and friends - only land gives them a true sense of status.
And so we must learn this painful lesson yet again.
Killing Putin would only make a temporary dent. The only way to stop this kind of beast is to destroy and rebuild like we did with Italy, Germany, and Japan.
We can't beat the Houthis, but Im sure we'll be great vs. the most battle tested army since world war 2.
Trump would almost certainly not intervene with nukes to protect non-US soil if Russia launched first, but there are plenty of European countries with nukes. Anyone in charge of Russia would have to accept the possibility that a first strike would leave them with a bad time.
Now the escalation ball's on our court. Are you willing to die for Latvia?
(And Medvedev does appear to be that bonkers)