Perhaps.
BUT !
According to my monitoring of the news on this topic from numerous sources including Pravda, al Jazeera, and more familiar venues,
the view you offer in #262 is an extreme minority view not shared by m/any of our NATO allies, or m/any of our trade partners in Western Europe or elsewhere.
Russia is a basket case. Her economy is substantially 3rd world, meaning natural resource exploitation (Gazprom), and industrially significant mining,
leaving value add / 1st world economy to Asia and elsewhere.
Putin is a troglodyte, lacking even rudimentary understanding of economics.
Putin's world view reveals only what Putin can glimpse through his Cold War peephole. He has no practical grasp of how to advance Russia, other than by primitive previous millennium standards, bloodshed on the battlefield.
I will tell you R5, Russia has very little to offer any military power with the ability to plunder Russia, simply not worth the effort.
So your portrayal of Russian vulnerability in superlative terms, "would force the use of nuclear weapons" does not seem to be a position presented at the bargaining table by anyone except perhaps for Russia.
And even if that, not persuasively so.
But the main reasons Russia is such a "basket case" are the illegal economic sanctions the US imposes.
That is more reason to resort to the nuclear option, when nothing else is available.
It makes anything else impossible to even remotely consider.
Since these US economic sanctions violate all the principles of defending individual human rights of the Geneva Conventions, there really is no option.
The nuclear option at least would prevent US dominance over Russia.
It is the US that has constantly resorted to "bloodshed on the battlefield"
In the past we bribed the Mujahideen to attack Russians in Afghanistan.
Now we are bribing the generals in Kyiv to attack Russians in the Ukraine.
This is all our doing.
Remember who NATO really is.
It started from the Allies who started WWI, so are England, France, and the US, the three worst colonial imperialists in the whole world.
It was the awful Treaty of Versailles imposed by the Allies in WWI, that took half of Germany and caused WWII, in my opinion.
So NATO are not the "good guys", but the war mongers who are behind all the world suffering, as I see it.
If we really wanted world peace, we would have to first have world justice.
And that would require a world constitution, rule of law, and a world judiciary.
But the US instead enforces a veto system of the Security Counsil members to prevent justice, prevent rule of law, and we ignore the world court.
