Originally Posted by
tartare
I think there are much bigger strategies at play here.
The US has realised it can badly weaken the Russian conventional military, possibly for decades, perhaps even permanently.
So it's fighting a proxy war.
NATO is quite happy to join in with the same goal.
Lloyd Austin has said as much.
It's a proxy war I agree with entirely by the way... all power to our Ukrainian friends.
We supply the weapons - they fight like demons - and Russia's conventional armed forces exhaust their ammunition, are turned into scrap metal and can only wave the big nuclear stick in future.
I think, this is a very good analysis.
Use all the Western located old-style Russian military equipment in Ukraine to exhaust and deplete the Russian army. Then come in with a coalition of Western forces (not Nato) and roll-up the Russians in Ukraine. Potentially even take-over Moscow itself. Roll up Belarus and bring a democracy there, the people want it (in contrast to all the other Western invasions in ME/NA).
Somewhere during that process, Putin will likely die of his cancer. Which might be expedited, when the narcotics and Oxygen tubes are swapped, just before his upcoming surgery.
Putin did pull that much power to himself, there will be nobody "in-charge", when Putin dies (see the plans to have the FSB head temporary replace Putin during his surgery, instead of the legal required prime minister). As such, after Putin, nobody will be prepared to push the Nukes button (apart from the manual background process involved to extend the button push into a missile launch also refusing to act).