You gotta remember that we've fought conventional wars before via proxy and it has never led to nukes. Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, etc. We've essentially bee

You gotta remember that we've fought conventional wars before via proxy and it has never led to nukes. Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, etc. We've essentially been playing this game for the past 70 years or so where its acceptable to send arms to nations and lend them support in conventional wars against one of the superpowers, without suffering nuclear retaliation. And there's a lot of powerful and wealthy people in Russia who don't want WWIII since nobody wins that and they want to preserve as much of their wealth as possible. If Putin himself feels like he's at the end of his own timeline and goes nuts there is likely to be a lot of people around him who would prefer to throw him to the wolves to try to save themselves as much as possible. Russian generals who would need to agree to glass the planet probably aren't on the same kinds of lists that Putin and his inner circle are on. Having grown up during the actual cold war when we were pretty terrified that Reagan and the USSR would stumble into nuclear holocaust by not backing down, this doesn't look that concerning to me. I'm worried about escalation and indiscriminate killing within Ukraine, but with conventional weapons, and even that will be restrained due to instant video being posted over the Internet. I don't think he can firebomb Kyiv. I can't imagine Putin survives that politically. If he starts trying to launch nukes at someone his own military has to depose him, they can't not act in that situation (maybe he could use tactical battlefield nukes against targets in Ukraine, but I probably can't fathom the levels of outrage that you'd see at that point, and I think his regime falls within hours). And there's Russians with a lot of wealth and power right now like Roman Abramovich who have to be very unhappy with how this is happening. If it gets any worse, they will throw their weight behind deposing Putin (if they haven't started already). Because at some point Putin could do something so horrible that the rest of the world would go after all the people like him, freeze all their assets, take everything away from them, and throw them in jail until their connections to Putin were investigated. Billionaires with very comfortable lives outside Russia ultimately aren't going to sit by idle while Putin fucks up their lives, and there are Russian generals who will take their phone calls.