f heavily armed intruders were trying to break through the door of your home, would you shoot them if they actually succeeded in getting inside? Most westerners do not realize this, but that is actually how the Russians view the conflict in Ukraine. They are entirely convinced that this is a life or death struggle with NATO, and almost nightly there is discussion about the possibility of nuclear war on television. The Russians are deeply scared, and they truly believe that the future of their nation hangs in the balance. In an existential fight for national survival, there are no limits. The Russians will do whatever is necessary to ensure the survival of Russia, even if that means causing a global cataclysm.
You may be reading this and thinking that all of this sounds quite silly to you.
But it doesn’t matter what you believe.
What matters is what the Russians believe.
When the Soviet Union broke up, NATO promised that they would not expand eastward and gobble up former Warsaw Pact countries.
But that is exactly what happened.
Ukraine was supposed to be where it finally stopped, but now Russia finds itself fighting an army in Ukraine that has been trained by NATO, that has been supplied with highly sophisticated NATO equipment and that is constantly being fed intelligence from NATO.
In addition, the successful counter-offensive that Ukraine has launched has been spearheaded by lots of foreign fighters from NATO countries.
Those fighters are supposedly in Ukraine “voluntarily”, but the Russians aren’t buying it.
At this point, the Russians are framing this war as a direct fight with NATO, and Vladimir Putin just greatly escalated the conflict…