You would not say this if you listened to what Russian nationalists say... There's a certain naivete among Westerners that the Russians are just like us and think just like us....
I'm not naive about it at all; quite the opposite. We're not dealing with a little country that shakes a little nuclear sword to get more pie. That's North Korea.
Russia is a country whose people still imagine themselves the peer of the United States in particular and NATO in general. Outside of the size of their nuclear arsenal, the plain fact is they're not,
but they think they are, and they're determined to
act like they are, that makes them dangerous. We cannot treat them the way we'd treat a country with a few dozen nuclear weapons. Russia can—all by itself—end civilization; perhaps even life on Earth.
When you say "He'll save that for if he thinks western forces are actually coming for him,", I'd tend to agree. But in his mind, "western forces are actually coming for him" can take a lot of different forms. It doesn't have to be as overt as tanks and planes actually crossing the Bug River. If he feels threatened by his own people because he's losing, he's apt to put that down to external pressure for regime change; and either to bolster his numbers at home and/or to warn the West off, it's not impossible he'd use a tactical nuclear strike in Ukraine out of desperation to hold onto what he's gained so he can claim a victory of sorts.
I've been largely taking issue with the idea that we should be more closely involved. As far as I'm concerned, we're skating the edge as it is. Like it or not, Russia's not obliged to read our intentions the way we want them to, or respond in a way we'd find appropriate. We have to be very careful in walking a line between abandoning Ukraine on the one hand and provoking Russia into something none of us want to see on the other. So far, we've been managing it reasonably well. Ukraine has held the line and even rolled back some of Russia's gains, and Russia hasn't crossed any lines so far that oblige us all to respond under Article 5.
To say that Russians would gladly lose Moscow and St. Petersburg, historic cities of great pride, just to give the West "a pin prick" is unutterably mistaken. Anyone who knows the slightest thing about history knows that. The Russians torched everything in Napoleon's advance to make taking and holding Moscow untenable for him. Leningrad—St. Petersburg—held out to the point of
cannibalism rather than surrender to the Germans in World War II, and they prevailed. That was all 80 years ago, well in advance of a nuclear-armed Soviet Union and Russia. We can't imagine straying more than a few miles into Russia before nukes would be on the table, if not actually used. By the same token, we have to make it clear the same is the case for us.
My hope initially was that the Russians would oppose Putin's war simply because they felt sympathetic to another Slavic people, but evidently the snub of Ukraine's leaving the Soviet Union and the notion Ukraine isn't a "real" country or "real" culture and that they're just "Little Russians" who speak the language badly is deep in the bone. I have a friend in St. Petersburg who's planning to move to Toronto who's casually expressed the same opinions. So what it comes down to is that we simply have to apply sanctions deep and hard and make it impossible in a practical sense for Russia to pursue the war. Deny them the means. That might mean letting them consolidate the gains they've made in eastern Ukraine; there might be nothing we can really do about that. Frankly, it's hard to see a quick, easy way out of this. The plain fact seems to be that we've slid back into the Cold War again, and things are going to be like this for the foreseeable future. If you're over 45, you know the drill. If you're not, read some history.
