Sixty/Forty: Giving or Taking?

Laughing Wolf is one of the old BLACKFIVE crew; I've had tacos with him. He's putting the odds of nuclear war at 40/60, but the odds of 'a nuclear incident' at 60/40. He expects some escalatory measures first:
Third, I would expect to see MOPP gear show up for Russian/Wagner troops. Open question for any OSINT who read this: is anyone seeing any MOPP gear with any Russian troops anywhere? Heck, is anyone seeing any MOPP gear anywhere?

That's a good point. 

4 comments:

sykes.1 said...

All of the nuclear war talk is coming from Washington. No Russian leader, not one, has threatened the use of nukes in Ukraine.

What they have done is reiterate Russia's 70 year old policy that they will use nukes only if (1) Russia itself is attacked with nukes or (2) if there is an attempt to dismember Russia by conventional war.

The most likely scenario is that the Ukrainian neo-nazis conduct a false flag operation using a dirty bomb. There's plenty of material for that at Chernobyl.

Tom said...

Do you think "an attempt to dismembering Russia by conventional war" would include attempts to retake land that Russia stole from Ukraine and now considers part of Russia, like Crimea? And what about Luhansk and Donetsk?

Grim said...

Apparently so, based on how he talks about those areas.

https://www.algora.com/Algora_blog/2022/09/30/full-text-of-vladimir-putins-speech

"We call on the Kiev regime to immediately cease fire and all hostilities; to end the war it unleashed back in 2014 and return to the negotiating table. We are ready for this, as we have said more than once. But the choice of the people in Donetsk, Lugansk, Zaporozhye and Kherson will not be discussed. The decision has been made, and Russia will not betray it. Kiev’s current authorities should respect this free expression of the people’s will; there is no other way. This is the only way to peace.

"We will defend our land with all the forces and resources we have, and we will do everything we can to ensure the safety of our people. This is the great liberating mission of our nation."

Later:

"And I want to close with the words of a true patriot Ivan Ilyin: “If I consider Russia my Motherland, that means that I love as a Russian, contemplate and think, sing and speak as a Russian; that I believe in the spiritual strength of the Russian people. Its spirit is my spirit; its destiny is my destiny; its suffering is my grief; and its prosperity is my joy.”

"Behind these words stands a glorious spiritual choice, which, for more than a thousand years of Russian statehood, was followed by many generations of our ancestors. Today, we are making this choice; the citizens of the Donetsk and Lugansk people’s republics and the residents of the Zaporozhye and Kherson regions have made this choice. They made the choice to be with their people, to be with their Motherland, to share in its destiny, and to be victorious together with it."

E Hines said...

the citizens of the Donetsk and Lugansk people’s republics and the residents of the Zaporozhye and Kherson regions have made this choice.

The same...choice...was made by the people of Crimea in the plebiscite Russia held there a decade ago. The claimed vote margin, though, would have required something around 90% of the Tatars to vote for union with Russia, the same Tatars only recently returned from exile in Siberia.

Pf-f-f-ft

Putin plainly finds it convenient to believe (at least publicly) the legitimacy of those plebiscites; what he does is a separate question. Ukraine continues to make progress into those oblasts, and so far, Putin is satisfied with his sort-of mobilization and his terror strikes into Ukraine's interior and west.

He may also be getting ready to widen his war into NATO cyberspace, with his recent demonstrations (my characterization of Rebekah Koffler's piece: https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/putins-cyber-armageddon-doctrine-seeks-expand-russias-offense-beyond-battlefield).

Eric Hines