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Switzerland has a magnificent public transport network. If someone lives in a place badly or not served by public transport, it's probably because this person chose to live in a single house with a garden, far from "noisy" apartment blocks. Also, it's ironic to live in the more expensive aspirational accommodation and not have enough money left to pay for gas.

Of course, this critique is not aimed at farmers and all other people whose job it out of cities. This is aimed at all workers whose job is on the city but do not like to live in the city. But as you mention are not wealthy enough to survive crisis times.

Everybody knows that if anyone starts using nuclear weapons it's game over for the human race. Both Russia and NATO have enough nuclear weapons to toast each other several times over.

Nobody is going to give the UKRAINE nuclear weapons, luckily they gave Russia's nukes back after the Soviet Empire collapsed.

Right now there is a [I would say pro-China] documentary on nuclear weapons tests that the US did in the Marshall Islands on netflix. It is beyond belief what the US did at the time, but a treasure trove of data as to what would happen if Russia/NATO started firing nuclear missiles. at each other. It isn't true that nobody would win, because the planet would win, it would rid itself of the human race.

That said I starting to feel like this is a PROXY war between Western Europe and Russia. A testing ground for weapons of war. I can understand the initial reluctance to give the Ukraine forces much in the way of weapons for fear they would be quickly overrun, but three months into the battle I cannot help but wonder why NATO doesn't step in here with a little more heavy duty equipment. There was a story i the news about a NATO player giving the Ukraine three big guns of some sort, and number that sounds like a pilot project to test them, scary. I did read an article too suggesting America is keen to simply watch the Russians bleed to death on this, I hope they were wrong.

Do the powers that be really think China will stand behind Russia; I don't think so. India I am less sure, although I think they know in their hearts that they most certainly wouldn't be better off in bed with the Russians. Would North Korea join the Russians, sure if they thought it would upset the Americans. A handful of countries in the middle East might see this as an opportunity to, but are they a force to worry about, not so much I think.

A realistic worse case scenario will be China invades Taiwan thinking the US is looking the other way and the ARAB states attack Isreal [again] also convinced the US has it hands full with Russia. At that point we would be facing a third world war.

We probably wouldn't have this war now, had they kept the nuclear weapons....just a thought. Russia doesn't look more mature than Ukraine, if this is what you mean.

I think people should not confuse nuclear weapons with ICBMs.

Yields are small enough these days that you can "safely" fire a nuclear shell and take down a large city without making half the country uninhabitable.
It's not nice. In fact, it's going to be pretty dirty and there will be lots of causalities and long-term consequences for those in the vicinity of ground zero.
But it won't be the end of the world (provided the other side keeps its cool...).

It will be the end of the world as we know it - but both sides know exactly how to "play" this with minimal collateral damage.
So, don't count on it not happening just because you believe it will "end us" all.
That would be a terrible mistake to make.

If Russia started to use Nuclear warheads than I think NATO would have little choice but to get involved, WW3.

Good chance that we would have had this war in the mid 90s. With all the madness going on in Ukraine at that time, Russia could have framed this as a "need to secure WMD from a failed state" operation - a bit like Iraq 2003. And possibly no one would have objected in the first place.

One can have interesting philosophical discussions what nuclear weapons actually deter. Other than the use of nuclear weapons.

How do you define "getting involved" anyway?


The 50-ish billion that congress has pledged for this year alone (mostly in the form of weapons-deliveries) isn't "involved" enough yet? That a lot of target-selection apparently is handled by US intelligence and US forces on the ground?


And besides, like in the case of MH17, just because a nuke exploded doesn't mean it was Russia. Or the US/Ukraine, for that matter.


You can trace and fingerprint the isotopes, of course, but that only proves where the Pu came from. Enough fissile material went missing over the last couple of decades on both sides of the iron curtain that will make final attribution much more difficult.


In the end, it doesn't matter, of course, just like few things will matter once somebody has hit that button ("inadvertently" or not).

What madness was going on in Ukraine in the mid 90s?

There are very few states capable of turning fissile material into a nuclear weapon and those would use their own fissile material rather than taking the risk of something going terribly wrong by using imported fissile material of unknown quality.

Postdetonation nuclear forensics is a very well researched topic and one would need to have more than some borrowed fissile material to fool the result.

All the nuclear states have a very good understanding of the principle of proportionality in defense after a nuclear incident so the situation is unlikely to escalate as quickly as some people fear.

What is the link between MH17 and a nuclear incident?

OK, madness is maybe the wrong word. But there was an economy in freefall, political instability, blatant corruption, oligarch power struggles and of course a lot of inherited issues with Russia from Black Sea fleet over gas transit and status of Crimea. Some described Ukraine as a borderline failed state.

I am not trying to dis Ukraine, I am just arguing that it is very possible that in this instability the Russians could have gone in with a "peacekeeping mission" that would have aimed to take their nukes away. Among other things.

Speculation, of course. I just don't buy the "had they only kept the nukes" argument.

"Wasn't us"

It's the attribution. MH17 was likely shot down by a Russian missile, fired from the Donbas region somewhere (IIRC). But the situation at the front was murky enough that both sides could point to the other side...

And as I said, once a nuke has exploded, it's likely it doesn't matter anymore who pushed the button.

Remember 9/11?

Nobody said "Wait a minute, can we look at this more closely before we launch the cruise missiles?".
That's just not going to happen this time around, either.

Yeah, but Russia was also very weak back then, with the same problems. The clash of oligarchs and other party members to get their hands on as many state actives as they could. Remember Vladimir was popular because promised Russians to get rid of this stuff.

This wasn't my point.

OK, my point was they were less preoccupied by Ukraine. Am I wrong?

I personally believe they didn't expect Ukraine to want their independence so badly. They expected Ukraine to need a benevolent father who would tell them what to do.

I don't know. It is speculative. Would Russia have been more preoccupued with a Ukraine with nukes? Maybe. Maybe not.

Trade isn't security. That aside, Ukraine's gas thefts and attempts at blackmailing a decade ago validated NS after the fact, and was probably a big driver behind NS2.

At the end of the day the invasion shows that the situation was no longer acceptable for Russia, that war and conquest are better from their POV than peace. That's the bitter reality. The reasons behind that POV will need to be considered in whatever kind of talks that are to come, whenever that will be. The earlier those talks start the less bloodshed and destruction is yet to come.

The really sad thing is that most of this may have been preventable. Now Russia creates the facts by force.

Was Russia better at those times?