that still doesn’t explain using an icbm against a nation you share a border with. there’s some message russia is sending. it’s either “don’t forget, we have icbms and they’re operational” or it’s “we are running low on standard missiles and have to fight weird”
I mean… The general point still stands. It’s not that western nations seriously doubt that Russia has these weapons. We know Russia has ICBMs, we know they have nukes, we know they’re willing to attack Ukraine with conventional weapons.
What Western nations doubt is that Russia would actually attack them or use nukes, because it’d trigger a united response they’d lose against, and they know that and want to avoid it.
It’s not about capabilities, but willingness.
My guess is the latter, Iran and North Korea aren’t exactly making state of the art weaponry. And Russia has burned through most of its rusted out and repainted armament at this point. That leaves either new weapons, scuffed imports from “shithole”-class countries, or weird weapons.
At any rate, nuking your nextdoor neighbors and having the radiation potentially drifting over parts of your country, potentially even your capital (yield dependent) seems like a stupid idea. Not to mention it ruining their “trophy” land that they illegally acquired.
see… but… i don’t think the dickhead wants the farmland in ukraine, i think he hates ukrainian people. he’s mad they don’t just fall in line and do what he wants. they have their own culture, and their own ideas about how the world should work, and those ideas don’t involve him being in charge of them. i’m very close with some ukrainians and the one thing they share, despite very different backgrounds coming up, is a strong belief that everyone deserves to be treated with dignity, respect, and the allowance to be one’s own true self.
that this idea is prevalent amongst ukrainian people even after so many centuries of russain oppression is dangerous to the russian autocrat. he rules through using terror to crush a person’s spirit to resist his power, and not only does ukraine resist, they give a place for other forces to resist, too, like siberian anarchists. he is not trying to gain land, i don’ think, i think he’s trying to kill an idea. he wants to kill the idea that anyone other than himself can be in charge
Funnily enough, it is not according to Russia. The definition of “continent” is almost completely arbritrary anyway, and exactly where you draw the line between Europe and Asia - or if you draw it at all - is probably the fuzziest bit of all. Russia and many other countries just consider Eurasia to be one continent
Personally I think that Asia is too big a category to be useful as it is and we should be drawing extra lines. Let the Himalayas, Urals, Altais, and Tian Shans count as continental borders too. Also the Sahara. All of those have been obstacles to human movement as much as oceans have
