> The people in developing countries, like usual, will now become victims of starvation, which will lead to revolutions and civil war, and ultimately more suffering.

> Somebody's twitter thread about how acksually this isn't a bad thing offers me

The Twitter thread very explicitly states that this is an extremely bad bad thing that will cause famine in specific developing countries and that the actual resulting issue we need to address to prevent it is logistics. From the thread:

> Again, specific places are facing EXTREMELY REAL wheat supply problems. MENA usually sources from Ukraine. Switching supply chains to India & other sources takes extra time, & if they're further away from India and Ukraine, it takes longer for supplies to get there.

> What these places are facing is a SHIPPING shortage.

> Not a lack of enough wheat in the world.

> Their food supply chain problems are still dangerous. A local, shipping-induced shortage that lasts a week can still kill you.

> To solve that problem, we gotta start with being clear on what the problem IS!

> We haven't! We decided it's a wheat shortage, not a shipping shortage.

> ...

> And that's how a 0.9% shortfall in global wheat production, that farmers already fixed 4 months ago, turned into a global commodity panic that solved nothing

> while a very real shipping problem continues to threaten people's lives.

Corrected that for ya.

I don't offer quick safe easy solutions to above issues. I don't think they exist. Don't vote for Trump-like populists effectively trying to sell rest of western world to Russia just because they are republicans just as you? Don't leave weak states at mercy of all-grabbing merciless powerful industries?

That's an empty phrase and wish too, there are reasons why Trump got voted in and almost won second time, he just said things too many people wanted to hear. I would say reasons of very polarized US society, you are either with us or against. As we can see ie in UK its not unique to vote populists in place even in countries with strong democracy.

I don't see what can be done more effectively in this multi-polar world to a bad state owning tons of nukes. Even if only 1% would be functional its still too many.

Or you want to ignore whats happening just to keep business going and prices steady? I don't think anybody in US government really cares about Ukraine or its people, but they are logically helping damage their adversary and Russia is working hard to give them moral/PR upper hand. But make no mistake, this war is about future of Europe, not just Ukraine. If Europe is split into pre-1989 order, US and its power projection will be severely weakened.

Have a hit squad taking down just Putin? Good luck there, I think as KGB agent he should have this covered. I think 1 billion USD and US citizenship & evac with family to anybody in his inner circle who would take him down would have higher chance. But maybe 10 years down the road it would be viewed as a very bad decision. You want to reform Russian society? I'd call that an impossible task for an external entity.

So, what's the solution to this situation?

I wrote this many times, the lowest blood price for subduing Russia is a NATO-wide airborne operation to behead Russian government, and a mother of all airlifts.

You fight a mafia state the way you fight a mafia, by simultaneously dismembering, and beheading it.

To completely subdue Russia, NATO has an option to do first strike nuclear attack with half of its combined arsenal along the lines I wrote above.

Russia is a hypercentralised state beyond imagination. Russia will cease its existence as a state if Moscow region is taken out, and the most limited counterforce attrition is ensured.

Anyway such attack would prompt similar ICBM response, they are generally quite incompetent as we can see in Ukraine, but not that incompetent to not have this working.

And nobody in west is going to justify killing few million civilians in Moscow, our society is well beyond that point.

It's not "Win or Die" for Russia. Anything but. It's one man's ego, and even Russians recognize that.

To assume only the US has any agency and only US actions make a difference, inevitably results in "The US is at fault for everything"

It took the US more that 8 years to retreat from Iraq, and you're asking a poor country to do such thing immediatly?

The genie is out of the bottle, I don't think the west will suddenly drop all sanctions, pretend nothing happened, and resume business even if such never-seen-in-history retreat happens.

Perhaps it's not "win or die" for Russia, but it is for Putin.

If you asked the average Russian on the street, they would probably agree that those are separate entities. If you asked Putin, I suspect you'd get a different answer.

This is a serious question. Yes, sanctions hurt ordinary people. Yes, there are second order effects that will hurt many people in the developing world. But equally, giving in to Putin will create a bigger problem for Ukraine now, and for eastern Europe and Taiwan in future.

There are no easy solutions here. Otherwise they would have been taken already.

Ukraine is now offering that to Russia. My ask is that the adults who were screaming at the top of their lungs to take that deal a month ago, were listened to.

Further that the people screaming at the top of their lungs that turning a nuclear superpower into an isolationist state, and actively working to collapse their economy, is a suicidally stupid thing, also be listens to.

NATO want to put missiles in Ukrainian and Georgian fields. Now that they've admitted that NATO's out of the question, why would Ukraine agree to make itself a target?

I've not been watching this as closely for the past week or two as I was previously, but I've not seen this. Particularly the "denazification" point seems unlikely to be agreed to by Ukraine.

Do you have a source for this claim?

Of course the “denazification” thing is dropped. It was nonsense propaganda to begin with.

I’m curious where you are following this? This was absolutely huge news at the beginning of this week. It’s really weird to me that wherever you are closely following this didn’t cover it.

It’s where I _was_ following it. Work has gotten in the way lately and I’ve had very little time for current events.

You do realize that even if his demands would be met for some reason, there would be another and another round of demands till you have nothing and he has everything. Just random things I recall were mentioned by him/PR in last month - complete demilitarization of Ukraine (so you can defeat whole country with 2 tanks), demilitarization of whole Europe (hinting at his long-term ambitions).

Everybody in politics recognizes this and realizes that peace talks are sham, yet another set of lies. War will end exactly and only when he decides it, not a second earlier regardless of whats happening in Ukraine and rest of the world.

The mistake would be believing it because of that. Just such a mistake put Trump in office.

And then in 2021, the sanctions put in place to keep them in check WRT nordstream2 were lifted!

The appeasement is exactly why we’re in the situation that we’re in: completely incompetent (at best) foreign policy appointees fumbling us into a potential global conflict.

It really isn't a secret that Putin is pining for the days of the Soviet Union and wants to reunite the old power block - so why would we ever want to risk sacrificing the stability of the EU to restore the Warsaw Pact and all the international conflicts that came with it?

Here is a great thread about this (read to the end): https://twitter.com/kamilkazani/status/1503053699798769666 also https://twitter.com/kamilkazani/status/1503768312236421120

I'm the _last_ person to defend the actions of states, but I don't see an obvious way the "West" - meaning the US/NATO/Europe - could have responded in a way that avoided this once it began.

> I'm sorry to be so cynical about this, but it has been like watching a slow motion, unending train wreck see the last year of foreign policy nightmares coming out of The United States.

Sigh. After regretfully defending the actions of states, I now find myself in the same position with regard to Trump. Trump's foreign policy - as odious as many people found it at the time - seems to have been quite effective at promoting international stability. I'll point out that it was in place for less than four years, so it's a fair criticism to say that this may have been at most a short-term condition, but... we didn't face the real possibility of global thermonuclear war during that time.

> Our foreign policy laziness/ineptitude has led to a situation where the leader of a nuclear armed, hostile superpower (Russia) has two choices: win his war against the west, or die.

I'll take issue here. Russia's actions - specifically, Putin's actions - have lead to this choice. Putin committed Russia to a war that was obviously going to be uniformly denounced by the international community. The invasion of Ukraine was poorly planned, poorly supplied, and had no reasonable victory condition. It was predicated upon the rapid collapse of the Ukrainian state. There was no fallback plan for how to handle things if it didn't crumble in a matter of hours or days.

I can consider the argument that our foreign policy set up the preconditions to allow Putin to be so completely reliant upon his own biased perspective, but I really don't think that holds water. If his perception of the Ukrainian state and people were so far removed from reality, who is to say that his perceptions of our foreign policy wouldn't be similarly warped?

> these absolutely idiotic sanctions we are imposing on Russia will lead to none of our stated foreign policy goals, and only suffering for the poor.

I disagree here.

The sanctions will lead to moving toward our FP goals and suffering of the poor.

We don't like to be so blunt about it, but the fact is that the very intent of sanctions are to cause people who are otherwise uninvolved to suffer. The idea is that those uninvolved people will then be incentivized to _become_ involved, disrupting the political and economic support of the target.

In other words... the purpose of these sanctions is to cause suffering among the Russian people, which in turn will make it more difficult for the Russian state to pursue military action. Given time, sanctions can even ignite revolution.

Finally: you're 100% correct to say that Putin has no good options at this point. "Win or die". Sanctions, long term, will ratchet that pressure up further and further until he is forced to make a choice. Forcing Putin to decide between losing and taking everything else down with him may not be in the best interests of the world...

I agree. Sanctions won't work till everyone applies it. Currently only the Anglosphere, Europe, Japan and SK are parties. That's far from the whole world.

Countries like India, African countries etc who aren't as privileged as the West may not be interested in sanctions when they have billions to feed.

And applying secondary sanctions on poor people is cruel and would eventually lead to distrust in USD and the western order which is already at its weakest. For eg, can you apply sanctions on crisis-hit Srilanka when the country is broke to the point of starvation?

This is NOT good for US hegemony. It will lead to a multi-polar world. If China/India can offer an alternative without the sanctions minefield, the poor countries would take it.