I would urge readers to at least look at comments #76 and after on the earlier, extremely informative thread about Russia, Ukraine, and nuclear weapons. This is a very grave situation, and I now think it's highly likely Russia will use tactical nuclear weapons. That was one natural takeaway from Putin's speech the other day: if the U.S. can use nuclear weapons to make a point towards an enemy (the U.S. use of atomic bombs in Japan), so can Russia, to put it rather simply. I'm going to open comments here for further discussion of these issues, since the last thread has gotten very long, although I commend all the participants there for the high level of discussion and invite them to continue here (and to offer a more optimistic interpretation).
As I'm teaching Thucydides tomorrow, I'll just conclude with a comment he made about the horrors of the civil war in Corcyra: "The cause of all this was the desire to rule out of avarice and ambition, and the zeal for winning that proceeds from those two” (p. 92). That was the cause of Athens's downfall as well, and it may be the cause of ours and Russia's.
