I live near the centre of a large city in the UK. I suspect that we here are more likely to be a target if there is a nuclear exchange than people close to Ukraine or Russia.
However, I also think that a nuclear exchange is still very unlikely. Putin is also suggesting talks on the Belarus/Ukraine border.
I'm hoping for/dreading one of those cold war fudges we had back in the bad old days. Some horse trading, perhaps a partition of the Ukraine with attendant population sorting and so on. Negotiations about force reductions and all of that.
It took the US/Alliance army of 180 000 plus air cover a month to render the conscript Iraq army non-operational and to gain some tenuous control of Iraq (or at least the major cities) in 2003. Putin must have had a time-scale of weeks in mind for this operation.
I shall be disconnecting from wall to wall news coverage next week as I do have anxiety issues sometimes. At the end of the day none of us here can do much.
> Putin is also suggesting talks on the Belarus/Ukraine border.
The word is that the Russians will suggest that they unconditionally surrender or Kyiv will get the 'Grozny' treatment. I'm pretty sure of the outcome there, but of course anything could happen.
They already suggested the unconditional surrender but I doubt that the threat of Grozny treatment will be enough for Ukraine to fold. They need something else. Something more convincing and I can't think of anything. Even if they only have the Grozny threat on the table and they go and act on it, in practice it will make the russian position much worse because Ukraine is not Chechnya, it's in a much better position (I could enumerate the differences but I think they are obvious).
However, I also think that a nuclear exchange is still very unlikely. Putin is also suggesting talks on the Belarus/Ukraine border.
I'm hoping for/dreading one of those cold war fudges we had back in the bad old days. Some horse trading, perhaps a partition of the Ukraine with attendant population sorting and so on. Negotiations about force reductions and all of that.
It took the US/Alliance army of 180 000 plus air cover a month to render the conscript Iraq army non-operational and to gain some tenuous control of Iraq (or at least the major cities) in 2003. Putin must have had a time-scale of weeks in mind for this operation.
I shall be disconnecting from wall to wall news coverage next week as I do have anxiety issues sometimes. At the end of the day none of us here can do much.