Russia and the US did not make progress toward a peace deal for Ukraine during their talks, a senior aide to Vladimir Putin has said, hours after the Russian president issued threats that Russia was ready for war with Europe.
In remarks to Russian media, Kremlin aide Yuri Ushakov said that after a five-hour meeting with Trump envoy Steve Witkoff and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, the two sides were “neither further nor closer to resolving the crisis in Ukraine. There is a lot of work to be done.”
The downbeat assessment of Tuesday night’s diplomacy follows combative opening statements from Putin as Witkoff and Kushnerarrived for talks at the Kremlin, in which he accused European powers of sabotaging peace in Ukraine and that “European demands” on ending the war were “not acceptable to Russia”.
No one is using nuclear weapons.
But let’s say I’m wrong. We should still not fear them. The reason being that accepting nuclear blackmail destines the human race to even more misery and pain than it experiences now.
Rip the bandaid off. Call the nuclear bluff. Then once it proves toothless and we don’t have fascists at the helm, work on nuclear disarmament so we don’t have any accidents.
Is that gamble worth the lives of nearly every living thing on the planet and the future of human civilization?
Russia alone has enough nuclear weapons to cause a mass extinction event. Even if no one else fires a single one, they could erase life as we know it.
If Putin sees a Leopard tank in Moscow, are you sure he wouldn’t order a launch? And if Britain or the French see those missiles and bombers, are you sure they won’t launch in retaliation?
That’s the logic that European leaders are operating under. If they pull the trigger on article 5 and launch a war with Russia, even if they win, everyone could still lose literally everything.
Push Russia out of Ukraine. No need to cross the border into Russia. Totally justified, no threat to Moscow. Sets precedent.
Why would that be so risky? If the answer is because nukes, my point stands.