Russia - threadbanned users in OP

NATO and the US are being pretty careful not to trigger any kind of nuclear conflict. That's very clear in what they've been saying.

I've said this before on this forum, but the comparisons with all previous wars simply evaporate when you add nuclear weapons, and particularly large quantities of them and you would be very naive to assume that an unhinged Russian leadership definitely would not use them. This is not the later days of the USSR and all evidence would suggest that the regime in Moscow is not particularly strategic or logical in how they have approached this.

The consequences of a nuclear exchange are incalculably serious. You would be looking at hundreds of millions of deaths, mass starvation and the end of civilisation as well as the utter deviation of entire ecosystems. If it was very serious (all or most warheads fired), you'd have a distinct possibility of very large parts of the planet being uninhabitable, and not just for humans but also animals and plants. That could lead to mass extinctions of all sorts of life, including humans. You would be looking at a situation where none of this would matter. None of history would matter. There might literally be no large or complex life left and evolution would have spend billions of years getting back to something like this again, assuming intelligence even ever evolved again.

Nuclear war is basically suicide and it would be a decision someone would be taking on behalf of the rest of us, and I honestly do not think anyone has the mandate do to that nor should they have.

The Ukraine invasion is horrendous, but the solutions to it absolutely have to avert nuclear conflict. It's not something anyone can win.

China's got its own agendas, and from what I can see at least, none of those involve becoming sucked in to some crazy Russian invasion of a neighbouring country. They've been fence sitting and they clearly do not want to be seen to be directly in line with the 'West' but I strongly doubt that China has any interest in being pulled into some ridiculous Russian empire fantasy.

China has huge issues with human rights abuses, it's an authoritarian state, and it has many problems. However, it's also a hugely complex trading economy of a billion people and has a strong focus on increasing and improving living standards and so on. It's a far, far more successful country than Russia in a whole range of areas, and I really cannot see it throwing all that away to cozy up to Putin.

My assumption is that China will continue with a sort of 'careful now! down with that sort of thing!' type approach while actually doing nothing.

If anything, China may have an agenda of waiting for Russia to stabilise again, whenever this does eventually end and it will probably end in a Russian coup, and then it can enter the market buying in at rock bottom prices to secure resources for its manufacturing sector.

I think at some level you have to assume all the nuclear powers, including Russia, realise that they are a pretty useless weapon as if you press the big red button, we're all gone. There is no winner. All of these people have families, friends, desires to swan about on yachts in the Caribbean and all of those things would become impossible. It would be, at best, life sealed up in some bunker until the food ran out.