While it is encouraging that the West is no longer simply sitting back and letting Putin's regime spew out whatever nonsense it wants, it continues to be alarming that no firm response is being made as Putin escalates inexorably. We know from the experiences (well documented now, thanks to the brief period during which Western historians were allowed to visit former Soviet archives) of the Cold War that Russian officers on several occasions refused to obey standing orders when they had every reason to believe the USA had launched a first strike against the USSR. This was because, faced with a choice between terrible destruction and global oblivion, these officers opted for the lesser of two evils. Back then, no one thought the West would sit passively in the event of a first strike by the USSR and so the concept of total obliteration was always uppermost in the minds of Soviet forces.
Today the West has repeatedly signalled passivity, and that changes the psychological dynamic considerably. It's all very well to issue statements about Russian false flag intentions, but such statements do not send a clear warning to the Russian officers whose actions are required to turn any order by Putin into an action. If NATO made it clear that any use by Russia of NBC weapons would result in an overwhelming nuclear strike against all Russian cities and key infrastructure, no Russian officer would obey an order by Putin to use any form of non-conventional weapon. As it is, those in the chain of command have grown up watching the West do nothing as repeated Russian aggressions have rolled forward. Under such circumstances, use of NBC weapons by Russia is far more likely.
Moreover, once the US Republican Party takes control of Congress in a few weeks, Putin will have every reason to believe that he has a free hand in Ukraine, as the GoP has clearly told the world that it intends to throttle all US support as soon as possible. This sends the clearest signal to Putin that the party of Trump will do nothing even when NBC weapons are used, provided there's a threadbare lie Trump and the rest of the GoP can use to pretend that it's "really" Ukraine's fault. Trump still loathes Ukraine for its refusal to fabricate evidence against Biden during the last presidential election. The infantile orange creature therefore may well be the reason Putin ends up succeeding despite all of Russia's failures and defeats on the battlefield.
