this is a blog by a russian living in the empire and in this presentation he shows you lots of stuff you won't find on your tv about ukraine and all of the issues presently on parade;

There is a lot of discussions going on about what Russia might do if the West ignores the Russian ultimatum.  All I propose to do here is just share a few thoughts with you.  This is not an thorough analysis, but only some musings of mine about what I hear.

First, Putin is both very predictable and, at the same time, very unpredictable.  The predictable thing about Putin is that he only uses force when there is no other option left.  The very unpredictable thing about Putin is how and where he is willing to use force.  He did not intervene in the Donbass, which everybody expected, and he did not allow the LDNR to take even just Mariupol, nevermind the rest of the Ukraine.  But when he moved a special task force into Syria, nobody saw it coming.  Ditto for the move to protect Crimea from a Ukrainian invasion.  When assessing Putin’s possible next steps, we need to keep in mind this paradox about him being both predictable and unpredictable.  So moving nuclear nukes to Kaliningrad and/or Belarus is not the only option for Russia.

Second, there is no way Russia will simply start a war, not against the Ukraine, not against the EU or NATO and not against the USA.  Only an ignorant fool would deliberately trigger a situation which might result in a planetary nuclear holocaust.  But Russia has plenty of other options.

Third, while in the 60s the USSR needed Cuba to deploy her missiles to force the US to remove its missiles from Turkey, Russia has no such need today.  Russian standoff weapons, both nuclear and conventional, can reach the USA from pretty much anywhere, including from Russia of course.  Creating bases in Cuba, Venezuela or Nicaragua are not, in my opinion, feasible or even desirable: I rather see that money pumped into the Russian military.

Fourth, all USN carriers and other ships now have hypersonic crosshairs painted on them, and they know it.  This will dramatically affect what the USN can be ordered to do or where to deploy.  Some observers have accused Russia of holding the Ukraine as a hostage.  This is silly nonsense.  But yes, the Russians are, for all practical purposes, holding the entire USN hostage, from a small patrol boats to entire carrier battle groups.  The only, but important, exception to this domination are nuclear attack submarines, where Russia has qualitative parity (or even superiority) but where the USA has a strong quantitative advantage over Russia.  However, USN SSNs do not have modern missiles and they cannot win a war by themselves.  They also have their hands full with China.

Fifth, we know by the size of the Russian ground force currently deployed several hundreds miles away from the the Russian-Ukrainian border that this is a defensive force whose task would be to stop a Ukrainian ground attack on the LDNR (Ukie forces, more of less of a similar size, are deployed a few tens of kilometers from that same border).  So don’t expect Russian tanks in downtown Kiev anytime soon...........read more.....