Putin was stupid to threaten nuclear war over such a small "red line". You should never write bigger cheques with your mouth than you can actually cash in. What is he going to do now? Tactically nuke Ramstein? It was a dumb ultimatum which was going to collapse at some point anyway.
The logical choice would be to arm the West's enemies in the MENA region, but Putin should have said so in the beginning instead of hyping some nonsense about nuclear weapons. And that's likely all that Russia will do in response to this (very minor) move by the West. Nothing much will fundamentally change, which is why Putin's hysterical rhetoric was a self-own.
A nation should have very few redlines which you are absolutely ready to back up if someone crosses them. A good example would be China's threat to encircle/invade Taiwan if Taipei were to announce independence. Everyone understands that China is serious. Putin by contrast clowned himself by pretending WW3 was going to break out over Ukraine hitting an ammo depot in Bryansk region. He not only looks weak to the West but also to his own domestic audience. Hopes he learn from this stupid mistake. Redlines should be few and realistic.
When the message doesn’t make sense to you, then you are not the intended recipient.
Personally I don’t think all of Putin’s ‘threats’ about nuclear war are meant for NATO, but rather for audiences in the East, because guess who doesn’t want global nuclear MAD even more than NATO?
I would not be surprised at all if the Russian military suddenly got another major power boost from their ‘own indigenous’ weapons development and manufacturing efforts. And/or if their space bases early warning and detection capabilities mysteriously got a quantum leap in both quality and quantity, etc.
If things got really dire for Russia, who’s to say they can’t hold regular large scale military training exercises with a certain other major Flanker user and do mutual base visits. Maybe they declare live fire training zones over parts of western Russia, and whose fault would it be if NATO cruise missiles entered said live fire zones without prior notification and got shot down?
