1) I specifically said “NOT YOU”
2) I am aware you claim to be from Italy, as I read your earlier posts and saw the images of the Newspaper’s you posted several days ago.
3) I have no reason to doubt you.
4) Again I specifically said “not you”
If I was inartful I apologize. It was not about you. I was furthering your discussion with alternate views.
5) I am sorry that I caused you distress.
ok, you have just a little modified your original post. I have undestood your continue repetition of "Some people, not you of course," as an irony, so, I apogize in turn.
And you are assuming by default that it will escalate to a nuclear conflagration.
That is not a given.
What might be the diplomatic solution that both sides could accept.
Not just “negotiations must happen”
Which I agree with completely. But see also only that no one is willing to set down and talk realistically to each other.
I understand your position. In short words, you assume that the nuclear escalation is not sure. HERE there is the very important point.
If it were simple to drive Russia out of Ukraine, it would have already been done, but then Russia would not even have intervened in Ukraine.
The most plausible way in which what you say would happen, in order to avoid a nuclear escalation, is through Poland. But in that case, Belarus would DEFINITELY enter as well and it is ready to do so. (And viceversa). Poland would need a "plausible", "acceptable" pretext to avoid a sure excalation, and this, of course, could not be "kicking Russia out of Ukraine", because this would lead to the worst scenario, namely nuclear war. The declared aim would be to defend, in a limited way, the part to the West, which is of Polish ethnicity, probably at the legitimate request of the Ukrainian government. However, if Poland, which is a member of NATO, were to put their boots on the ground under that "innocent" pretext, nothing would prevent it from gradually receive reinforcements from the rest of NATO. So what would Russia and Belarus do? It would immediately crush the initiative the hard way, to prevent the NATO presence from expanding, or not? If it does, it will be said that Russia is attacking a country that only intervened to help Ukraine in a limited way. This would be enough to justify the activation of art. 5? If the answer were "no", we would still be VERY close to it. And it would take very little to really get there. If it got there, NATO countries would go to war, but how much "formally" and how much "actually"? And to what extent could the situation escalate? We could also have a kind of stalemate in which everyone, perhaps only formally, is at war, but nobody or almost no one really does it, in the hope that at some point someone will quit, perhaps for economic reasons. As you can see it would be an ambiguous situation and this uncertainty is what you are talking about because, basing on the arguments made here, we could not say "ok, nuclear war is certain!". THIS IS the GREAT ambiguity. And it is this ambiguity that makes war truly possible! If they had known, on the eve of the First World War, what was going to happen, they would not have started it. Yet, despite the awareness of the risk, it was thought that nothing would happen, that the catastrophe was not certain, that finally all would be fine, that Russia would not mobilized, that Germany would not mobilized, that France would not mobilized, that UK would not mobilized and in the end ... that the war would be short.
There is no deterrence against human stupidity: the heavy machine gun, just like the atomic bomb, was invented to kill, but just like the atomic bomb, it was regarded as a deterrent that would have made any war impossible. It was said, just like today, that a modern war would have been too big cost and that no one would be mad enough to send hundreds of men to assault, with the certitude of the death, to be killed by just one who pulls a trigger. And this is how all the Great Powers mobilized: with the idea that such a crazy thing could would be avoided. Then for months, in fact, almost nothing happened: they stood there looking at each other through the trenches. They also celebrated Christmas together. It is not with the certainty of the massacre that wars begin, but with the doubt that it could be avoided: which is EXACTLY your position. But eventually heavy machine guns started to sing ther song.
It wasn't much different for World War II. When did the real massacre in Europe begin? After Italy entered the war, that is practically when it was thought that it was going to end in favor of the Axis. The real massacre began in 1941, practically after 2 years of war in which the losses, in general, were rather limited.
This is why I say we must be careful! A war is a reaction that cannot be controlled: it can flare up immediately, or for months the soldiers can guard themselves from the trenches and celebrate Christmas together, or for 2 years maybe everything happens with rather limited damage, but God only knows what can happen after. In 3 months we could be formally at war and think that there is not much difference compared to today. But in 6 months? In a year?
I do not take for sure that if a war breaks out now, it could flare up immediately: we could create for ourseleves the illusion that it will not be so, that everything could settle down with little damage. But it will be only an illusion: if a war begins, albeit slowly, sooner or later all hell will break loose. This concept was undestood from the Western leadership before the outbreak of the Second World War, with the so-called "Appeasement": it was recognized that Germany had some reasons and that it was better to welcome them, before unleashing immediately an another war.
What I find particularly worrying today is that, while Chamberlain and the whole West recognized Germany's reasons for the humiliation of Versailles and they were not accused to be pro-Nazi, today anyone who says that Russia HAS its reasons, he immediately becomes a "pro-Kremlin", a "Russian propaganda spreader", etc. It seems to be a really great desire to wage war around: because nobody knows what it is anymore. Because if we had the awareness that people had at that time, we would be much more cautious: this is why we had 80 years of peace, because there was the TERROR of war. And today there isn't.
And to quote Sir Edward Gray, if someone, like you, who have the power to decide, will really think to could limite a war, "the lamps will go out all over Europe and we would never see them lit again for our entire existence."
That is.
