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Can Russia Refrain From Hitting Back? – by English Outsider
by English Outsider
“The fact that Russia has lasted this long is a miracle. How much longer can it hold on is another story.”
Posted by: bored | May 31 2026 15:23 utc | 7
The main thing is that we’ve all got this far without going nuclear. It was getting just a little edgy toward the end of the Biden Presidency.
Not that anyone would be fool enough to press the button deliberately. But when tensions are running high, and in spite of what seem to be some comprehensive deconfliction arrangements, the chances of accident are just that little bit higher. I’m guessing, though it can’t be an informed guess, that the chances of accidental Armageddon have receded since President Biden left office.
So the question now is not so much one of straight survival. It’s whether the Russians can keep plodding along as they are, which keeps costs fairly low for them, or whether they’re going to have allow the conflict to spill out into Europe.
That seems on the face of it to be a simple calculation. What is the cost of the damage the West is currently doing?. What is the cost of stopping them doing it? Not just the cost of the missiles it’d take to prevent the Western powers shipping drones and missiles to Ukraine, but the diplomatic and political backlash long term if the Russians were to extend the war to the European theatre as a whole. Remembering they’d have to strike American assets in Europe too because the Americans are still key players when it comes to supplying materiel and ISR assistance and helping plan the various attacks into Russia.
But it’s not that simple a calculation. It’s not just a matter of balancing relative costs. War has its own momentum. Emotional response matters too. I remember the Falklands war. In terms of scale that’s a ridiculous comparison. In terms of emotional response of the general public, not.
At that time the risk and cost of countering the Argentinian invasion looked to be greater than the loss incurred by just letting the Argentinians have the islands. No question. But the public mood was nothing to do with relative costs. “We’re not having that!” was the public response in the UK. The politicians of the time, though fully aware that the risk and cost of responding outweighed the benefits, would almost certainly have lost power had they not acted in accordance with that public mood.
So here. Striking supply depots, logistics facilities and military HQ’s in Europe goes dead against the policy that the Russian administration has been pursuing for the last four years. They want to put the Ukrainian conflict to bed without letting the conflict spill out into open war in Europe and they’ve been doing OK on that so far. But then the public mood enters the equation.
If someone were sending missiles and mounting sabotage and assassination attacks into England we in the general public wouldn’t be doing cost benefit analyses. We’d be jumping up and down and insisting our politicians did something about it. Turn that obvious truth around. We in the West are sending missiles and mounting sabotage and assassination attacks into Russia and we can be dead sure the Russian general public is jumping up and down about that right now.
So that’s the question they’ll be pondering in the Russian Security Council. How much more rope can we give the West, they’ll be saying, before the Russian public gets fed up with just passively taking the knocks. You and I, “bored”, have no way of guessing what they’ll decide on that. And it’s not as if you and I were players ourselves. We’ll just have to wait and see what their decision is.
Dimitri Orlov has weighed in on the question. I tend to think he’s right. Some excerpts:
“By “the former Ukraine” I mean what’s left of the former Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, as crafted by Lenin and Stalin out of random bits of the Russian Empire, then let loose by “drunk president” Boris Yeltsin. Since then it has lost half of its population (the younger and more capable half), virtually all of its once mighty industry, and is now a shadow of its former self. It has a very high rate and a very low birth rate and is undergoing rapid demographic collapse. Its one remaining use (for the West) is to annoy Russia. It is the one and only category in which the former Ukraine remains a success.
The West supplies the former Ukraine with drones and drone components and the Ukrainians use them to launch attacks on civilians in random locations within Russia. They have tried to launch drone attacks to damage military and industrial installations, oil refineries especially, but this has had minimal effect and these locations are at this point fairly well defended with anti-aircraft systems.
And so the Ukrainians have switched to targeting civilians………
In turn, this causes politicians and public figures in Russia to leap to action and demand that something be done.
For example, professor Sergei Karaganov has advocated the use of tactical nuclear weapons against Western nations which supply the former Ukraine with missiles and drones. Karaganov’s logic is simple: the West is not sufficiently scared of Russia; nuclear weapons are very scary indeed; therefore, using nuclear weapons against the West would fix this problem. In line with Karaganov’s thinking, the Russian Ministry of Defense has produced a target list of factories that manufacture the missiles and drones which end up in the former Ukraine and, it is reasonable to assume, stands ready to destroy these factories when so ordered…….
Some people take issue with the fact that Russia has not yet prevailed militarily in the former Ukraine. Some of them take this to mean that Russia is weak; others claim that the Russian leadership is divided or indecisive or that #Putin is overly cautious. They think that Russia should smite the #Kiev regime’s forces forthwith and that Russia should triumph and claim all the territory it wants. Both sworn Russophobes and supposedly patriotic Russians are guilty of such wooly thinking.
Indeed, lots of Russians endlessly repeat the mantra that “victory will be ours.” But what does that actually mean? If Russia were to score an outright victory in the Ukraine, smashing the Kiev regime and causing its military to retreat in disarray and dissolve among the civilian population, would that be helpful to Russia? It doesn’t take too much deep thought to discover that it would not be helpful at all.
• Russia would come to control a vast, chaotic territory. It is sparsely peopled by lots of retirees, disabled veterans and war widows. There are some 100.000 fabulously corrupt functionaries, arms dealers and crooks. It is infested by Western agents and mercenaries. Thanks to relentless brainwashing, none of them are particularly well-disposed toward Russia. Incorporating this territory into the Russian Federation would require lifting it up to Russian standards, and this would require massive and unpopular federal budget outlays.
• Then there is the question of how these new, most reluctantly Russian citizens would vote: probably not quite the way Moscow would like. West of the Dniepr river, Russian patriots become rather thin on the ground. After 35 years of splendid isolation, rejoining the fold of the Russian civilization may not be possible for much of the remaining population. It would take several decades to bring these people around, and it is unclear what level of interest exists within Russia for doing so. In 1991, at the time of the collapse of the USSR, 80% to 90% of Russians perceived Ukrainians as a brotherly nation. In 2025, according to polls by the Levada Center (designated as a “foreign agent” by the Russian Ministry of Justice), the proportion of Russians who consider Ukrainians a brotherly nation is approximately 50%-52%. Given this trend, in a few more years attempts to reintegrate the former Ukrainian SSR into Russia would receive considerable pushback.
• Lastly, winning in the former Ukraine would simply prompt the West to start another proxy war against Russia. The list of animals to be sacrificed on the altar of Western Russophobia has already been drawn up and it is quite long: from north to south, there is Finland, the Baltics (too insignificant to mention by name), Poland and Moldova/Transnistria. Here, too, there is a fine difference between members of these sacrificial, notionally Western nations saying that they will fight Russia (and holding training exercises in which they pretend to fight Russia) and them actually doing so, as opposed to running off and hiding.
These are the negatives of a quick, outright Russian victory in the former Ukraine. And then there are also some positives being offered by the lack thereof.
• Perhaps most importantly, this conflict allows Russia to complete a civilizational about-face, from being wedded culturally and economically to the decadent, degenerate and hostile West to establishing amicable, mutually beneficial relationships with the increasingly prosperous, fast-growing and traditionalist countries of Southeast Asia.
• Part of that about-face is a societal transformation within Russia itself. At the beginning of the Special Military Operation in February of 2022, Russia was spontaneously relieved of quite a number of influential citizens of split loyalty who chose to leave Russia. Half of these people have since realized that they had made a mistake and have come back, but the lessons they learned, and imparted to the rest, were invaluable. The basic lesson seems to be simple: “The West has nothing to offer us.”
• Then there is the usefulness of the former Ukraine as a proving ground for new weapons and war-fighting techniques, where the use of armor and large infantry formations is a thing of the past and the line of separation is now a k!II zone as wide as 50km patrolled by drones and infiltrated by infantry in groups of two or three under cover of darkness, rain and fog to launch surprise attacks and take over specific fortified locations.
• Finally, the Special Military Operation is a powerful tool of political consolidation. Returning veterans reenter the workforce and, in recognition of their achievements on the battlefield, are promoted to management. Their children receive prime consideration for free education. All of this helps ensure that Russia’s governance structures, both public and private, will remain patriotic and loyal for the next several generations.
For all of these reasons, it is far better for Russia to be winning than to win. Indeed, Russia is winning every day, just a tiny bit. Almost every day the evening news carries stories of conquest of yet another hamlet or village or deserted industrial zone in the western portions of what are now regions of the Russian Federation or the newly established buffer zones in Sumy or Kharkov regions. These tiny conquests are achieved with an absolute minimum of casualties. People have stopped attempting to calculate casualty ratios some time ago, but before that happened numbers such as 7:1 (that is, Ukrainian to Russian casualties) were commonly heard even from Putin himself while ratios of 10:1 and higher were also floated. Overall, the Russian army is growing and the Ukrainian army is shrinking while Western financial support for the Kiev regime is dwindling. This implies that this conflict can’t go on forever and will wind down perhaps as soon as the end of 2026, perhaps a bit later.
Similarly to how it is better for Russia to be winning than to win in the former Ukraine, it is better for Russia to be preparing to nuke Europe than to actually do so. That it is preparing to do so is certainly a fact: Oreshnik missile batteries, which can be nuclear-tipped, have been positioned in Belarus, allowing them to strike anywhere within the European Union within a few minutes. Training exercises have recently been held to make sure crews are ready to arm them with tactical nuclear warheads. Surely, an attempt would first be made to make an impression on EU governments using conventional weapons before resorting to tactical nuclear weapons, but the track toward escalation has already been laid and the escalation train is already rolling down that track, albeit quite slowly.
It is all a question of what it will take for the EU/#NATO to cease and desist in supplying the former Ukraine with weapons it uses to kill and maim Russian civilians. The choice is simple: accede to Russian demands and make peace with Russia, or get nuked. The choice is also simple for the citizens of the EU: don’t bet on the good sense of your leaders (what good sense?) and make preparations to survive a Russian tactical nuclear strike. The more public you make such efforts, the less likely the nuclear strike will become.”
https://boosty.to/…/7811018b-986f-4d46-9fea…
Posted by: wagelaborer | Jun 4 2026 20:03 utc | 60
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