Russian invasion of Ukraine

Irwell said:
I've never been convinced that there was a risk of escalation as long as it was absolutely clear that Russian sovereignty wasn't under military threat. We have never been close to anything that resembled that and their military intelligence would have been clear. I also don't see that the theoretical dangers of regime collapse necessarily reflect a greater threat than regime continuation, especially when you start throwing probability into the mix. These have always felt like convenient excuses for holding back. Is this to prolong the war in the way described? I can't say, but I wouldn't claim to be shocked if we found that out in the future.


If the objectives are catastrophically harming the Russian military and economy then I would agree. If the objectives are a swift end to the war with as few Ukrainian casualties as possible so Ukraine can return to normalcy then I think we could have done more.


Agreed. Russia simply can't be allowed to return in the form it was before like nothing happened. If it does then no lessons will have been learnt. Other countries are looking on at what happens here as well.
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On the subject of escalation we’ll never know, and you may very well be right, but it’s a huge thing to get wrong and caution clearly won out. No one can say with any certainty that things couldn’t have got out of hand if US, UK and French missiles had been fired into Russian territory in 2022, for example. Especially given the Russian’s paranoid national psyche. The boiling frog approach has ended with no escalation; whether it prevented it is a matter of conjecture, but it would have been an overwhelmingly catastrophic thing to get wrong and so it’s hard to criticise the overarching caution too much in my eyes.

I agree we could have done more though.
 
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