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They (some e.g. former US commander of European provinces) claim they'd to start hitting them with conventional weapons everywhere and destroy all their units in Ukraine, that's counting Crimea too.
That is, a real war would start. I'm not sure about that. By most accounts Russians have killed at least fifty thousand Ukrainians troops so far, if they nuke several thousand would that change anything? Russia is not losing this war, the stakes are too high, so it's going to keep going on. They cannot afford to give up.
Americans must surely know this. We've seen America talk about red lines and then do nothing repeatedly, so what's crossing one more red line for a desperate state ?
US should also be aware that it's far less in american interest to fight a war over Ukraine than it is in Russia's interests. Completely lopsided importance.
And in any case, even a real air war and some cross-border raids by NATO would not be very impressive to the mayfly attention span of cosmopolitan consumers.
The strategic air defense network they have is expected to require weeks to months of reducing till bombing can proceed in earnest with conventional assets. Unconventional assets (stealth) are rather scarce and whether they're truly stealthy to a peer adversary is a rather open question..
Also, escalation wise,it's not clear at all whether China would let Russia lose; they have a very serious interest in not acquiring any more unfriendly nations on its borders, which would be the result of 'decolonising' of Russia.
Arms shipments by the world's biggest industrial power or even 'volunteer' units could make a lot of difference. After all, why should only Ukraine have large volunteer formations? There's a rather amusing precedent for China there.
Russians has a more attractive option of evening out the odds though - closing the skies, destroying all satellites by launching kinetic anti-satellite weapons at their own satellites or just releasing lots of crap in a reverse orbit. That'd prevent Americans from tattling to Ukrainians locations of objects of strategic interests, and make any subsequent war against the hegemony that much easier, as American military uses satellites more than anyone else.
Wouldn't kill a person, no pesky radiation, and will negate most of US advantages in this and the upcoming Taiwan war. Also it's going to make astronomers happy because it'd kill Starlink too and a decades long pause in space launches would mean they won't have to stop being lazy and start designing huge orbital telescopes.
What exactly are the stakes? What exactly would happen to Russia that would be so intolerable if they did give up and just went home? Would it really be so bad?
Ok, try to imagine that China is unified and vaguely democratic. It'd still be China and an enemy country of the US out of sheer rivalry. Hegemons hate competition, China is simply too big. "Democracies aren't enemies is a BS concept" - UK and USA almost came to war before WW1.
Then try to imagine Texas secedes because it's fed up with D.C. and signing up a mutual defence treaty with this alt-history China, that would probably also involve basing Chinese military. Would D.C. crowd acquiesce to this?
That's about how Ukraine becoming an American ally looks like to Russia. Absolutely unacceptable to Russian state.
Yeah, well, Russians didn't give up in '41 when their position was far worse, and they're really not likely to give up now.
Maybe they'd have considered it once, but all the talk of 'decolonisation' made it impossible.
'41 was existential for the Russians. This is, at worst, existential for Putin and the die-hard nationalists/imperialists.
You really think a median Russian would be fine withe the partitioning of Russian federation ?
More fine than dying at war or from a nuclear exchange, I reckon. Many countries were partitioned over the course of history without their entire combat-able population dying in one final hoorah. Many of them, I suspect, more patriotic and less concerned about the value of their lives than a median Russian who just wants to grill.
Median Russian remembers the 1990s when the West was happy with what was going on in Russia and shudders.
Hence the idea of 'decolonisation' and 'denuclearisation' is most likely not popular at all with Russian population.
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