Comments by "Aristocles Athenaioi" (@aristoclesathenaioi4939) on "The Problem with Russia's "Escalate to Deescalate" Strategy" video.

  1. Welcome to my youth. What I learned is that the people who are vaporized in the fireball of a nuclear strike are the lucky ones.
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  2. I do think that Russia can escalate to de-escalate, but to do so with chemical weapons rather than nuclear weapons. Using Sarin gas on Kerson would kill vast numbers of Ukrainian forces, and likely many Russians as well. Unlike a dirty bomb or a tactical battlefield nuclear which spreads radioactive material that will take hundreds of years to allow for any inhabitation, a Sarin attack would at worse result in contamination that would last tens of years as opposed to hundreds of years. Russia permitted Syria to use chemical weapons, thought to be Sarin gas, on Syrian civilians; therefore, Russia has some experience with the pros and cons of using something like Sarin gas. Also considering that neurotoxins and poisons are Putin's method of choice when dealing with political opponents, it seems easy to imagine that he would just scale up the use of neurotoxic agents to attack the Ukrainian Army. Also, how NATO would respond to the use of chemical weapons is far less clear than the reaction of NATO to the use of a nuclear weapon. Putin may suffer international condemnation for using chemical weapons like Sarin, but he would likely keep India and China neutral, and the expected response from NATO is much more ambiguous.
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