Comments by "Ash Roskell" (@ashroskell) on "James O'Brien explains the two things that terrify Vladimir Putin | LBC" video.

The way Putin’s acting, I begin to wonder what his health status is? Imagine how the world would react if they found out that Putin had a terminal diagnosis of some sort? Worse still, a terminal diagnosis of a disease that includes dementia on the way to the grave? Even his own oligarchs in the Kremlin would be looking to replace him at that point.
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@col8353 : But isn’t that exactly what Putin wants, and you just showing that you’re falling for it? A few explosions here and there, the occupation of nominally, “separatist,” areas (though people are fleeing those areas, so they’re not all separatists) all seems low key enough while the civilian body count only grows in countable hundreds. All while we overlook the fact that an independent, sovereign democracy is being INVADED by a dictatorship! Italy has as much right to re establish the Roman Empire as Russia has to invade Ukraine! What’s Putin’s legitimate claim? That they used to run Ukraine when they were a Communist Dictatorship? What’s to stop him from rolling across the entire world, other than force?
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@teddansonLA : Hence the question, right?
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@pierrebuffiere5923 : Ooooh. People aren’t ready to listen to that bit of reality yet. The idea that this could spiral out of hand, like so many wars do, isn’t something they want to think about. ✌️
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@skindred1888 : Not really. Sure, the countries in conflict never went directly to war with each other, despite (as you say) funding and backing the wars of other hostile entities against one another. But, battles were fought and people were being murdered, captured and tortured all the time. The term came about to describe the fact that the two main protagonists seemed to remain permanently on the brink of all out nuclear war, and remained (at least partially) on a war footing, until Gorbachev and Reagan came along.
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@AndrewLumsden : No, that’s not quite right either. The term was coined in 1947 by a cross partisan businessman and advisor to several presidents, Bernard Baruch, during a speech in which he said, “Let us not be deceived—we are today in the midst of a cold war. Our enemies are to be found abroad and at home. Let us never forget this: Our unrest is the heart of their success.” And the press ran with it. It’s the attempts at causing political division, unrest and destabilising the enemy’s countries from within that lies at the heart of the definition. He was referring to the Soviet Union at the time, but he could well have been speaking about Putin’s Russia today, right?
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