Ukraine guardsmen open fire on crowd

[CatholicEdHead]

29. I am sure our options area always being considered

and we do have some form of assets on the ground both in Ukraine and Moscow. Putin is playing retro Cold War chess. I am sure soft measures are attempted to be used now. Pootie Poot is using a faux embracement of the local groups as a pretense for mostly bloodless coups each region at a time.

It has to be soft power as we and Russia both have enough nukes to take out the planet many times over, so MAD is still on the table and our conventional military is depleted and early in the rebuilding stage after Afghanistan and Iraq operations. Even if we had a conventional force of meaningful size to deploy, the Ukraine is not a place that non-Russian armies have done well in historically. Hard power would bring us to the war that we spent 40 years in the Cold War to avoid.

Pootie Poot will push as far as he can and knows his limits, then we will be in a modern detente of stalemate. Where that line is depends, Pootie Poot wants to bring back the USSR he grew up with, so the 'stans of Central Asia and Baltic States have to be on guard. A line will be drawn before Poland and eastern Europe.