Related: I usually find these conversations kind of gliding around what I think is the primary point. There's the military tactics, gambles, and trade-offs; and the immediate and long-term effect on societies; but I feel like it's usually kind of glossed over that 10s of millions of civilians will die. It's one thing to talk about putting the lives of your army on the table, and gamble on how long it will take for society to catch back up to where we are, but it's quite another thing to put entire civilian centers on the table. Of course, I really have no idea how far Russia, or anybody, would have to go to make that gamble worth it. Putin's threats of the nuclear murder of millions of innocent people for the "crime" of participating in the war he started essentially puts NATO in a much larger-scale version of the "negotiating with terrorists" situation. I've never been so unsure as to what the proper level of response is.