Yes, please, tell me more about what Trump would have done to stop his favorite dictator

I mean, he is pretty smart. We are letting him get away with it, he's invading bc he can.

Biden should just clean out the Russian supply lines with a quick air strike from Germany. The war would be over in 24hrs.

But he won't. And Putin knows it.

Ah yes, that 40-mile-long (or however long it is now) Russian military convoy making its way toward Kiev as we speak. Certainly seems like a ripe target for aerial bombardment, yes?

Yeah, indeed, that slow-moving Russia convoy could be smoked from the skies by a NATO airstrike. Russia could lose a huge chunk of its army in a flash.

And then Putin would promptly nuke all of our cities to the ground.

What? You don’t think he would?

Putin has so far defied every analyst’s prediction of the lengths to which he’ll go to prosecute this insane war.

Make no mistake: That military convoy trucking toward Kiev is implicitly under the Russian nuclear umbrella. That’s what makes this moment so dangerous.

So cool your jets, Rambo.

The U.S., the E.U., NATO, and other Western democratic allies around the world (Australia, South Korea, etc.) are actually playing this perfectly. Hammering Russia’s economy with the most widespread and devastating sanctions ever, while sending large amounts of military and humanitarian aid to Ukraine, but stopping short of boots on the ground or planes in the sky, that would give Putin justification to broaden and further escalate the military response (which he can do all the way up to nuclear Armageddon).

Russia’s strategic nuclear stockpile (coupled with Putin’s one-man rule and demonstrated bloodlust) gives Russia a comparative advantage in the military sphere — so, the West does its best to make Ukraine a stalemate/quagmire while hitting Russia where it is weakest. The economy.

If any strategy can prevent this Ukraine crisis from becoming an actual WWIII, that’s it.

"...defied every analyst’s predictions...?" You mean no one saw this invasion coming? Now these same analysts are telling us that if we help Ukraine, Putin will end the world.

Even Nikita Crushchev himself knew better than to start a nuclear war. As you said, Putin can barely carry on the war as it is. He knows he's bitten of more than he can chew. Attacking Russia with sanctions only is the perfect way to prolong this war and loose hundreds of thousands of lives.

Putin is hyperextended already, and a well placed air strike could put everyone out of their misery. Putin's goal is the domination of Europe, not the end of the world. He has supposedly put his nuclear weapons on 'high alert'. Well the truth is they've been on just as high alert since trump was president and before. Putin wants NATO and the U.S. to stay out, and is trying to look bigger than his is by threatening to do something that everyone knows he will not.

This situation, as scary as Putin would have is seem, is nothing compared to the Cold War and the Cuban Missile Crisis.

I disagree, this situation is more serious than the Cuban Missile Crisis. Nobody was actually shooting at each other at that time. The crisis was resolved within a few days through deft diplomacy, and yes, some brinksmanship. Right now Russia and the U.S. aren’t even talking to each other, at all, and Russia and Ukraine are only making a show of it with their mutually incompatible demands.

Here, alas, we have simultaneously: (1) intense shelling in most major cities of Ukraine, and (2) hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian refugees streaming West, and (3) NATO countries openly arming Ukraine, and even urging their own citizens to go volunteer to fight — out in the open, not even hiding it —and (4) also doing their best in a highly coordinated fashion to unleash financial Armageddon on Russia with the most crippling sanctions ever.

The hard truth is that we may already be in WWIII. This shit ain’t ending in any 24h, brother.

I’d argue Putin right now is making the leaders of the USSR (Stalin excepted) look like Mahatma Ghandi.

The key difference between then and now is that back then, the USSR had allies all over the globe, and the USSR had a credible and frankly optimistic belief in itself: that Communism would one day prevail over the West through time and persistence. Communism was actually an attractive ideology to people all over the world in those days — on paper, not in its ugly reality.

Putinism on the other hand doesn’t even try to be. Russia today is a declining power, and Putin knows it. After decades of “humiliation” as he sees it by the West, this is Putin’s desperate gamble to grab whatever he can for Russia, and if he can’t have it, then he’s happy to shell or even nuke it to the ground.

Strong, self-confident, secure, and self-possessed animals aren’t the most dangerous. Wounded, cornered, and paranoid animals are the most dangerous.

What the Russia analysts (both inside and outside Russia) got wrong was the degree to which Vladimir Putin has over the past decade really consolidated Russian power all to himself — unchecked even by the oligarchs — coupled with failing to recognize his emotional and impulsive side, belying Putin’s preferred public persona of cool calm and collected.