Old men are dangerous: it doesn't matter to them what is going to happen to the world. -- George Bernard Shaw

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/6809999-old-men-are-dangero...

Precisely.

Come and see. They don't have to hold land and in most cases, the strategic goal is to have puppets hold it for them. USSR was three levels deep in puppets (four if you count "republics").

They tried puppets in Ukraine for some time. They also have a dependent client state on another of Ukraine's borders, in Belarus, "led" by a terrified semi-lame autocrat who needs to prove his loyalty to Putin to continue in office.

Bad things (and increasingly belligerent, isolated psychopaths) on two sides.

As a very credible threat. We will now do 'x', and if you interfere we will nuke the capital of those countries that interfere.

Note that Putin has nothing to lose from all of this.

Not only does Putin have nothing to lose from all of this, there is more than a hint that he has nothing to lose full stop. More than one analyst and political aide has observed that Putin has changed significantly on a personal level, and appears to be paranoid about Covid and about all his generals and advisers.

It's not just a threat; at this point it is a risk.

Agreed. The attack on Ukraine is actually rather later than I imagined that it would happen (I thought this would happen immediately after Trump lost the election).

What happens next is anybody's guess and that's a very bad feeling to have in times like these, the fate of the world as we know it is in the balance.

As we have seen before, only very recently: bad things happen when psychopaths start to unravel, especially malignant narcissists.

Putin has long kept his narcissism under a kind of control.

A bit of bare-chest, bareback horseriding. A few ice hockey matches with opponents who comically offer little resistance. A gigantic pseudosecret palatial residence that looks like a seat of power for a Bond villain, but is actually his safe space.

But even in Russia's nationally televised broadcasts Putin appears to be struggling to control his emotions and his temper.

It's not particularly difficult to see that loyalty to a psychopath loses its currency when that psychopath has no use for you, but also that using your loyalty as a constant mediating influence becomes impossible when the psychopath departs from reality.

The question for any kind of diplomacy, hardball or softball, is this: is Vladimir Putin still in full control of himself? Because he's behaving unusually on the basis of his prior record. Only a handful of years ago he was a very different figure on the world stage. If his narcissism has no supply, no moderation, things could get even uglier.

And yet again he is signposting it -- "all relevant decisions have been taken."

We kept pretending his signposts were diplomatic noise, when in fact he's just a psychopath telling people what he is going to do to them.

When a narcissist goes down they'll take anybody that is a witness to that with them if they can.

> I thought this would happen immediately after Trump lost the election

It took a minute for them to realize we have two feeble minded and weak kneed presidents in office currently. The cats outta the bag now.

Maybe he has nothing to lose from threatening. But he would have a lot to lose (namely Moscow, and any place where he's known to usually spend time) if he actually fired a nuke at some EU capital.

We all have a lot to lose here. If Russia lobs a nuke, US is next, followed by the rest of the powers. Who knows who China would target.

Once one nuke flies, WW3

I'll bet that that would not be Paris or London. But to try to guess what someone who has nothing to lose will do is folly, Putin might very well be beyond caring even about such stuff: he wants his legacy cemented and there are two ways out of that that would satisfy him: the fact that he is remembered as a great Russian or that there isn't anybody left to remember what kind of an idiot he was.

For some idea of this mentality, if you haven't seen it yet I highly recommend the movie Der Untergang, which is as historically accurate as they could make it, and which gives a unique perspective on how things could get so bad that parents would poison their children to avoid them having to live in a world where they weren't the victors.

> I'll bet that that would not be Paris or London.

Doesn't really matter which one he picks: NATO article 5 would ensure retaliation.

But yeah, I agree with the rest of your point.

NATO article 5 is a meaningless piece of paper in and of itself if the will to retaliate isn't present and we will only find out about that at the moment someone wants it invoked. I would not necessarily bet on knowing how that ends. The response against what happened just now is underwhelming, and the various investments in fomenting nationalism/isolationism may well pay off. These are very dangerous times.

If they’re launching nukes, you think the rest of the world is just going to sit by and watch?

> I highly recommend the movie Der Untergang, which is as historically accurate as they could make it

And in case anyone didn't make the connection, is also the movie where the scene used in all those "Hitler hears about..." YouTube clips is taken from.