No offense but this is pretty far fetched.

First of all, if Putin wanted to level Kiev he could do it with conventional bombs and artillery. Nuclear weapons are not needed.

But second of all, *why* would he want to flatten Kiev? Why don’t you read his goals in his own words? https://web.archive.org/web/20220224024154/http://en.kremlin...

He says he sees Russians and Ukrainians as one people and wants to unify them. No, I’m not defending him, I oppose war in all circumstances.

But it’s important to understand that he’s not some evil maniac out of a comic book that wants to kill everybody, he has actual goals.

That was written under the assumption they'd have occupied Ukraine in 3 days or so, not the embarrassment that is happening now. At this point, Kremlin will put out any false flag and use it to justify levelling Kyiv and his population will suck it up.

Now that the Ukrainian people are resisting "unification" and he has failed to achieve goals, he's ordered revenge attacks on Ukrainian cities to level them like Grozny or like Nazis destroyed Warsaw block by block after the uprising. This follows his own words too: he does not think that Ukraine has a right to exist. It's a textbook example of genocide and it's as rational as Hitler's desire to murder all Jews.

why would you believe a single word that Putin says though? This is the guy who among many other lies said on camera in 2014 that the green men that took over Crimea and were armed to the teeth were just some random locals and not Russian military. Just a couple of days before the current invasion denied any intention to do so while detailed attack plans were signed long before etc.

And besides taking pieces from your neighboring country, waging long shadow war in Donbas, telling everyone how Ukraine is not really a country anyway and then invading doesn't really seem such a great plan for unifying nations.

As far as I understand relations before Russians and Ukrainians were pretty OK before 2014 events. With his own actions Putin has made a country that has roughly 1/3 of the population of Russia mostly against him. Healing these wounds and relationships will take decades even once the war ends.

The things I can read here..