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Trump is not the only one who has refrained from bombing Russia. The Biden administration did not try either, nor did any European country.
Russia inherited the Soviet nuclear arsenal, which happens to be the largest in the world. I am sure that their nukes are not in the best shape, but even if only a quarter of their ICBMs work, a nuclear war would easily dwarf the substantial meat grinder which has been Ukraine.
There is a certain etiquette about avoiding a shooting war between nuclear powers which has seen us through the Cold War. The understanding is that any direct military confrontation carries a risk of escalating (as conflicts often do). Getting through the CW without it escalating was tight as things were. I do not think it would have worked if NATO and USSR had fought conventional skirmishes, where any hit of a radar system might be in preparation of a first strike and any plane approaching an ICBM silo might aim to reduce your retaliatory capacity.
So if the US lands forces in South Vietnam, the USSR will not deploy to North Vietnam, but rather give them military aid. Likewise, if the USSR is fighting the Mujaheddin in Afghanistan, the US will not send in the marines to bolster their ranks.
"Just going in and bombing them" would dispense with that. If you start bombers against Russia from NATO airbases, these NATO airbases will become legitimate targets. Likewise, it seems unlikely that you would achieve air superiority without destroying AA sites within Russia. Or you might directly give Putin the Ayatollah treatment and bomb the Kremlin. At least we would learn something about the effectiveness of US efforts to intercept long range missiles.
And Russia violated that etiquette by invading Ukraine. The rules of the game post-Korea were that you didn't attack the other side's client directly, only by arming your own client as a proxy. The only countries that a superpower invaded directly during the Cold War were their own clients in order to suppress rebellions. Vietnam is a good example - the Soviets could arm and defend North Vietnam, and the US could arm and defend South Vietnam, but when North Vietnam actually sent troops over the border and invaded the South they were Vietnamese. [The reason why the US couldn't win in Vietnam is that Cold War rules meant you couldn't win by invading the North, and you failed to build a South that could do defend itself without Americans at the pointy end of the spear].
Russia invaded Ukraine, justifying this by saying that Ukraine was a NATO client. They then said that they would consider NATO defending its client to be nuclear provocation. This isn't an obviously insane position, which is why we let Putin get away with it. But Russian troops invading a NATO client with no plausible deniability is a provocation that Stalin or Brezhnev (or Reagan) would have considered excessive. American and Russian planes shooting at each other over Ukraine is nevertheless worse.
Not really. The mechanism to protect a client is that their superpower builds an army base with some tripwire troops in it in their country.
I think that Russia's concerns were that Ukraine could join NATO, at which point they would be sacrosanct on pain of WW3. So they decided to do something about that before that happened.
This was not a breach of CW nuclear etiquette, just very stupid IMO. Sure, having an opposed military alliance in front of your doorstep is not really something anyone would be thrilled about, but realistically Russia is one of the most invasion-proof countries in the world. Historical attempts to conquer them became textbook examples of military disaster, and that was before they also acquired nukes. Russia was not worth starting World War Three over in the 1970s, and it most certainly is not in the 2020s. Any general who went "Now that Ukraine joined NATO, we can finally plan to send tanks into Moscow" would be considered fucking insane.
More realistically, Putin was not worried about invasion-proofing Russia, but simply wanted to extend his sphere of influence. Not that this worked out great for him either, between going through Soviet stockpiles, losing Syria, becoming dependent on Iranian drones and North Korean troops, reviving NATO and so forth.
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