I'm not aware of this, but Putin has drawn many red lines that should not be crossed and always threatens with the same sentence, NATO doesn't want war on its territory… It's probably a bluff
Hrmmm....
"Every wargame that we conducted back in the intelligence community ended up in a nuclear war.
There was an escalation ladder. And the Russians have mapped that out in the course of twenty
years, and we are on it right now." -Rebekah Koffler, military intelligence analyst,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FFOodusuoP4
Can't they play out a wargame scenario that doesn't end in a nuclear war? What is wrong with them?
Discussion
Bluffs are played by normal people .. normal people don't invade countries !
This is literally how countries are formed. Ukraine is made up of lands that never belonged to Ukrainians.
I dont know the history of this part well enough to comment which land belongs to whom ..but my point was :
**never assume how a leader of a poerful people may react .. their compulsions (good or bad) are hard to predict for "normal" people ! .. Thus risk is super high **
countries are formed from the lands of neighboring states, and Ukraine is no exception. Literally half of the countries in Europe have illegally annexed something from each other.
The cost-benefit analysis of a strategic nuclear strike is: cost=everything, benefit=revenge? It's a horrible decision that nobody would make. But the cost-benefit analysis of Russia using a hypersonic IRBM to attack a Ukrainian military target is: cost=(a missile, probably provoking a further escalation that will undoubtedly be calculated to cost more than the benefit), benefit=(maybe it will cause the other side to think twice instead of escalate, destroys an enemy missile factory). Still the wrong decision to escalate, but it is not as dumb as the nuclear strike.