A great headline but as usual is not anchored in reality.

An adviser to Ukraine has said some stuff about negotiations…

Dan Rice, an American serving as an advisor to the commander of Ukraine’s armed forces, told CNN’s Outfront on Tuesday that he believes Russia is looking to negotiate to return to positions it controlled before the February 24 invasion.

Rice made the comments when discussing Russia’s strikes on Ukrainian infrastructure and outlining what weapons he thinks Ukraine needs. “They are attacking the cities, trying to attack the grid, making it a very difficult winter,” he said. “They are trying to, in my opinion, trying to get to the negotiating table, to try to go back to the 2014 lines.”

A return to the “2014 lines” would mean Russia keeps Crimea, and Kyiv would have to cede the Donbas region, or at least a portion of it, to the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics (DPR and LPR). But Rice said those terms wouldn’t be acceptable for Ukraine.

“Ukraine won’t have it. Ukraine wants all of their land back to the ’91 lines. They really need air defense systems and aircraft,” Rice said.

(antiwar.com)

Rice’s comments come as the prospects for a diplomatic solution to end the war seem slim. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky recently signed a decree ruling out talks with Russia as long as Vladimir Putin is president, and US officials have reportedly ruled out pushing Ukraine to negotiate even though they don’t think Kyiv can win the war “outright.”

There will be NO negotiations….and the nuclear game of chicken will continue….

The U.S. and NATO have been preparing to fight Russia on the plains of Ukraine for some 70 years (the fall of the Soviet Union, terrorism, Iraq, etc., notwithstanding). In such a war, the 19th Artillery duels that characterize the current conflict would be replaced by endless U.S. precision air strikes. Imagine American A-10s, or even B-52s practically at the edge of space, tearing into those long Russian columns. About the last thing Putin wants is to fight NATO directly over chunks of the Ukraine, instead of by (weaker) proxy.

All the chest thumping about nukes….Putin has roughly four options.

One would be a demonstration nuke, say a sea-level low-yield blast outside Odessa designed to rattle the windows, maybe shut off the lights, but otherwise do little harm. As the U.S. concluded late in the Second World War, demonstrations effectively prove you lack resolve, not that you are committed to nuclear war. Plus, the mere use of the nuke likely pulls the U.S. into the conflict with nothing gained by Russia.

Second would be a nuclear attack against a large concentration of Ukrainian troops. Apart from irradiating the territory he hopes to conquer, Putin could achieve something similar, close enough for government work, with an extreme massing of artillery and airpower. A big boom to clear a path, but without the U.S. coming in as an aftereffect. Why go nuclear when the same outcome is available via conventional weapons?

Third would be a leadership-decapitation strike based on good intelligence that would eliminate President Zelensky. This one presumes a) near-perfect intel (see the Americans’ failure trying the same gag at the start of two Gulf Wars, shock and awe, which missed Saddam despite all of the resources of the United States), b) that the same could not be accomplished with massed artillery, and most importantly c) that Zelensky is really the one-man Washington-Churchill-Patton the Western media portrays him as—in other words, that his loss would have the impact the Western media believes it would. If a Zelensky deputy rises from the ashes and demands revenge, the gambit fails, maybe even backfires.

Last would be the destruction of a Ukrainian city, causing mass civilian casualties and creating nuclear terror, forcing a swift surrender as did the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the other Japanese cities, which would have fallen if they had not surrendered fast enough. Despite the firebombing of Tokyo (never mind Coventry and Dresden) the Second World War proved to America that nothing raises terror levels like the use of nuclear weapons. Skin melted in Coventry the same as in Hiroshima, but it is Hiroshima we remember. In Ukraine this would be intended less as a Strangelovian exchange than as a tactical escalation.

I realize that most Americans hate Putin….most think he is deranged….I do not think Putin is so stupid as to unleash the nuke option….big talk is just that….

I will apologize when he makes good on the threats and uses a nuke.

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

P.S.  Has anyone noticed how no one really gives a sh*t about Ukraine anymore?