Interesting. The endgame here seems to be Russia's outright defeat in Ukraine, including the return of Donbas and Crimea. Will Putin resort to nuclear weapons to avert this? The expectation here seems that he will not. But it's one hell of a gamble.

Do I think it's a sensible policy? No. A sensible policy entails an effort to de-escalate, striving to freeze this conflict until better times. Putin is 70 years old. He'll go one way or another. It's better to outwait him and play the long game.

We are staring into the abyss. Even if the worst does not come to pass, something tells me that by the time we are finished saving Ukraine from Russian imperialism, there won't be much left of it to save.

Sergey Radchenko is the Wilson E. Schmidt Distinguished Professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. He has written extensively on the Cold War, nuclear history, and on Russian and Chinese foreign and security policies. He has served as a Global Fellow and a Public Policy Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Centre and as the Zi Jiang Distinguished Professor at East China Normal University (Shanghai).