I sure didn't. I had elaborate ideas about how we could help the Ukrainians sink the black sea fleet on our behalf. And even then I figured we'd have to subsidize their insurance. Turns out they were just going to back down lol
Source Article (Forbes)
Israel per se has fuck all to do with this, to be honest. Attacking a foreign flagged civilian vessel is a big deal, especially when the eyes of the world are upon you and you cannot declare something to have happened on the fog of war. There’s an American P-8, which is an intelligence as well as an anti-ship/anti-sub plane, covering the ship. No one knows what it’s rules of engagement are, but the implication is that it’s there to defend the civilian ship. Attacking the US plane would be an act of war. Attacking the ship may trigger the American plane to defend it by launching weapons against the attacking vessel.
The one thing that the Russians could legitimately do is block the ship physically. They can play chicken by threatening to steer into it, but I can’t think that they’d risk widening the war at this point. No shade on Ukraine - this one is going to go down as one of the greatest victories in the history of warfare - but if they can’t make progress against Ukraine then NATO will go through them like crap through a goose.
Sure, it’s been pretty obvious that NATO would massacre the fuck out of them. Doubtlessly Putin has known that for some time.
I don't think we need to be caring about who would win in a conventional war with Russia. We need to be worrying about who would lose in a nuclear exchange with them.
Everyone. Themselves included
pretty much everyone is not stupid enough to do that, because as we've known since the 60s at least, we'd all lose. Russia has nuke subs ready to do retaliation, we have a fuckton of them too, China does, random other countries like the EU and even Israel is ready to nuke the fuck out of everyone else just in case. Putin makes weak nuclear threats and he knows that "we'll nuke you!" would result in most of Russia being completely smashed, along with most of the EU and USA. The danger is some idiot feeling nihilistic and egotistical enough to try it. It would never be a reasonable policy decision by any country.