re: #84 Greup

I’m not worried about nukes right now.

Putin has the same method as Trump, if he encounters resistance he just raise the stakes.

So I’m more worried that he would do an operation against the Baltic States or Finland and just dare NATO to fire back. If they do, he has the perfect propaganda weapon to get the Russian people behind him. Then the economic sanctions, the pullout of western companies etc, gets the logical explanation that it was preparations before the attack by NATO on Mother Russia. Thus saving his regime.

The Baltic states are NATO. We would be obligated under treaty to respond. If he attacks Finland from here, we’ll assume he’s fighting a world war, and we would respond with military might. I know that sounds semantic, but at the moment, Putin is claiming he is in a kind of police action. We’re not really taking him at his word, but we’re “tolerating” this as a coalition with the idea that this will be bad, but it could be worse. If he invades Finland, that’s suddenly a whole new ball game.