re: Ukrainians have now attacked a second critical Russian nuclear early warning radar.

So we have B-52s flying to Russia's doorstep
LINK
and now Stoltenberg ramping up the nuke talk.
LINK
Muh defensive alliance.

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So we have B-52s flying to Russia's doorstep

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Get back to me when any of those B-52s drop a bomb on Russia.

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and now Stoltenberg ramping up the nuke talk.

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So Putin, Medvedev and Lavrov can't go a week without threatening the U.S. and our European allies with nuclear weapons but when the head of NATO replies to those threats, THAT is what upsets you?!? Seriously??

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o we have B-52s flying to Russia's doorstep

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Explain to me what you think this means.

Should we post an article every time Russia does this to the US and allies, which has been occurring since 2012 or so?

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and now Stoltenberg ramping up the nuke talk

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The content of the article is more measured than you make it seem...

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Those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Folks blaming this wholly on Russia, and excusing Western input, have not learned a thing.

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You are guilty of this. Your views amount to complete appeasement and you continually deny the self-determination of all of the Eastern European allies who made great efforts to join the West.

Again, was the world any safer when the USSR had its own sphere of influence? What makes anyone think it would be safer if we retreated from Eastern Europe?

Brother, you typed this out unironically:

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main narrative blamed it all on Vladimir Putin of Russia. The rationale rested on little other than because Litvinenko was a Putin critic

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Do you understand how stupid you seem at the moment?

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Calm down Russian.

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I'm calm. The exclamation marks I included were meant to convey my surprise that you, a poster who usually makes informative, well-reasoned posts, would say he thinks Peter the Great is a good role model even if you claim you were just being rhetorical.

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I tend to like you Russian so, please take no offense.

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No offense taken...

Be careful Russian, you are getting the Putin excusers all riled up.

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For one, there is no motive, even with Litvinenko being a critic of Russia

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He was more than that. He was employed by MI6 to help them fight the Russian Mafia and he worked to sound the alarm against the ‘active measures’ campaign the Russians started running in the West after 2000. He was also a friend of Putin’s rival Boris Berezovsky.

The amount of information Litvinenko revealed was rather copious, implicating the former KGB and the FSB in all sorts of extra-territorial actions, some accusations more believable than others, but regardless, he wasn’t some silent critic.

In many ways, he represented the major issue between Russia and the west in that he was allowed to speak freely without consequence about Russian security state activities from afar. This reflects an older trend in Russia, which dates to the 1880’s, after the assassination of Alexander the II. In response, the Okhrana was created, and in 1883, they had a foreign bureau located in Paris, which spent considerable resources tracking infiltrating the many revolutionary groups in Western Europe during the fin de siecle, Indeed, the French considered them a distinct Russian police force, and many French and British agents worked for the Okhrana before The Great War.

Later, after the revolution in 1917 and the eventual victory of the Bolsheviks, you had those same secret police functions pursued by the OGPU and eventually the KGB.

Arguably, there is a strong tradition within the Russian security state that the only way to deal with any dissidents is through violent means. There’s a famous article (I think in the New Yorker) about Putin when he was in Paris in 1982, there to murder a dissident with testimony to Putin’s character and demeanor provided by his roommate at the time, who was not a member of the KGB. Extra-territorial actions and assassinations were not unusual for the KGB nor Putin.

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But assuming that there was a sufficient motive to kill him, think about this: Why would Russia use a very rare, very expensive, and easily traceable radioactive substance to kill him instead of some cheap poison or just shooting him?

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Firstly, polonium is not easily traceable. It emits less gamma radiation than other radioactive substances, allowing it to evade detection by a Geiger counter, and was only detected through chance. It was chosen specifically because it was believed it was not traceable, was deathly fatal to humans if ingested and only required small amounts. Furthermore, since that particular isotope of polonium requires neutron activation, which can only come from an active nuclear reactor or a nuclear weapon, which suggests direct state involvement.

Given that Litvinenko revealed that Putin had restarted a laboratory that specialized in developing poisons, I tend to think that the choice of a radioactive material that was thought to be untraceable would have been bitterly ironic and personal.

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Why risk smuggling radioactive material into the UK which is an act of

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Namely because they did not think it would be detected or that the investigation would be so detailed as it was. One of the accused suspects was later elected to the Duma, and was also later quoted as saying some very strong words about dissidents of the Russian state.

As for why the Russians were willing to risk major diplomatic fallout, that reasoning is more complex. Firstly, what I think underpinned at least some of their belief is that, at the time, they had the goodwill (mostly) of foreign governments. It was around this time that high-level government officials in the UK and US started feeling the ‘cold shoulder’ in Moscow, as they described relations before then were warm and cordial, with much more information shared between agencies than after. Secondly, there is the possible belief that an extra-territorial assassination would have a ‘chilling effect’ on other Russian dissidents, not dissimilar to the effect it would have on Soviet dissidents.

Lastly, shooting a dissident on foreign soil would have been much more difficult, as the meeting was arranged with Litvinenko through one of his friends, who just happened to be in town for a soccer game with his family. That sort of assassination would have brought far more scrutiny, because there isn’t even the potential to hide it. By the time Litvinenko finally met with investigators from Scotland Yard, 17 days had passed, which allowed time for the suspects to leave the country without having to invoke any diplomatic protection.

So ultimately, you seem to be asking why a security state would expend any energy on a former member of that state after they have left that apparatus and ultimately murder them on foreign soil. States which have extremely robust internal security services generally view the free speech you and I might find normal as grounds for treason, as they did in this case and as they did in the Jamal Khashoggi case. Secondly, these states always retain strong plausible deniability to avoid scrutiny. Thirdly, generally states will not war with each other over dissidents like this, but the accusation of such an assassination is extremely grave and usually requires direct and extraordinary proof, as was probably the case in the recent spat between Canada and India. In Litvinenko’s case, the circumstantial evidence points towards the suspects he met at the Millennium Hotel, and once the poison was known, their steps throughout London were traced, as the suspects were not careful about contaminating their surrounding area.

Maybe you are young or something or new to the world of geopolitics, but it is better to always be cynical about everything, as humans, even powerful ones, can be remarkably petty and are not always good judges of what is and what isn’t a threat. If you are used to hitting everything with a hammer, then everything is a nail. At the same time, when you do threat assessment for some event some time later, you might miss something. How many times have we heard that police had so and so suspect under surveillance but the suspect was not deemed a threat, etc.? Threat assessment is a difficult, time-intensive and imperfect task which requires a robust bureaucracy and most importantly, a free press which can query those documents and ask if the authorities made a critical mistake. When you don’t have a free press or a tradition of freedom of speech, who is there to check your own power?

I’m assuming you are asking this question about Litvinenko in good-faith. If I find your reply, if you reply at all, glib and unserious, I’ll say as such. Don’t disappointment.

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You will not be in my thoughts as we entered WWIII.

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That hurts my feelings...