Regarding Kaliningrad: "If a bombardment/invasion started, seize at least Lithuania" - Alas, that wouldn't stop a bombardment, and it wouldn't stop an invasion of Kaliningrad from Poland. Russia holding on to a large part of Lithuania isn't going to compensate for Kaliningrad being destroyed.
"Fuck the Baltics. These idiots need to learn about 'Finlandization' along with Finland itself. " - 100% agree. But Russia has two problems with that.
The first problem is that massing enough force on the borders of the Baltics for such an invasion, from Belarus and from Russia, is a highly visible process that takes so much time that the US and NATO can surge forces and arms into the Baltics for their defense. Those will not be enough to stop Russia, but they will be enough that the takeover of the Baltics will not be a matter of hours or even days.
The other main problem Russia has with that is while it is seizing the Baltics Russia will suffer intolerable attacks on St. Pete and Kaliningrad as well as very deep attacks on other cities in Russia. If you think the West's panic over Ukraine is sufficient to launch strikes deep into Russia, well, that's nothing compared to what the West's panic over a Russian invasion of the Baltics would be like. They'd strike hard and desperately throughout Russia, even launching at cities and facilities in the Far East from subs.
There is a significant possibility that the US would use tactical nukes to defend the Baltics. There is also a significant possibility that Russia would use tactical nukes to defend Kaliningrad and St. Pete. Which brings me to...
"No one is nuking anyone over Lithuania or Kaliningrad." - Respectfully disagree. You don't know Russia if you don't realize that Russia will use nuclear weapons to defend Kaliningrad. You also don't mention St. Pete, which is the other target hanging out there that Russia cannot defend without using nukes. You may have your doubts about Kaliningrad, but I think that no matter how little somebody knows about Russia they understand that Russia will, without fail, use nukes to defend St. Pete.
As for the US nuking anybody over Lithuania, I agree that's unlikely. But it is not impossible, and it won't be just about Lithuania. It likely will be about all three of the Baltics and that's a different deal.
Before the latest round of insanity from the West I would have agreed the US would be more likely to throw the Baltics under the bus before they used any nukes, even very small nukes. But now I think there is a real possibility they will convince themselves they can apply a managed escalation and use only a small tactical nuke or two to stop Russian forces that have crossed the border and would otherwise overrun NATO forces in the Baltics.
"They are not nuking anyone or getting into shooting wars with anyone." - Events have proven you wrong. The US is already involved in a shooting war with Russia.
The US has destroyed Russia's Nordstream pipeline using the US Navy in a direct military action that is very much a "shooting" act of war. Approximately 100,000 US military personnel are working 24/7 on "back office" tasks to kill Russians both in Russia's new territories and in Russia's older territories. They operate AWACS aircraft, remote sensing drones, and hundreds of satellites to gather real-time intelligence to guide strikes. They compute strike packages that enable US munitions launched from Ukraine to bypass Russian defenses to kill Russian people, and they appear to be directly participating in those strikes by operating the weapons involved, uploading the coordinates and flight paths and commanding the launches. Pentagon officers have bragged in public about killing Russian generals and sinking Russian ships. The US is in a shooting war with Russia.
Russia is operating the war as Russia judges best for its own interests, so for now it is overlooking the US's direct role because it feels a more effective way to prosecute the war is to dispatch one enemy at a time. Russia will be in a much stronger position to deal with the US after it has at least neutralized the nazi state in Ukraine. But that doesn't mean Russia will not shift gears to fight the US directly if the US makes that unavoidable by escalating in ways Russia chooses not to ignore.
"The Western public will not tolerate a real war with real privation." - That has no bearing on what's going on because the Western public has no idea what's going on. They don't know they are in a real war.
I talk to people in the West all the time, including those who pride themselves on getting good info from neutral sources, and it's amazing how totally marinated they are in propaganda for morons. They don't realize the degree to which the US is neck-deep in this war, or the degree to which the US has prosecuted its war against Russia in a way that does not allow the US to just walk away when it loses.
One reason Americans don't realize the US is at war is because they're not touched by it. It's the same as Afghanistan, Syria, or Iraq: Americans kept doing the idiotic, superficial things they did in their home life without any idea that the US over the course of decades was killing a million people on the other side of the world while losing wars.
The reality of the US continuing to be a genuine superpower with a very large economy and a large nuclear arsenal sitting in safety behind vast oceans is that Americans will not be touched by any real war short of a nuclear exchange that features nuclear explosions in the US itself.
Given how the US is stretched thin around the world and the logistics issues involved in massing sufficient US forces in Europe for a conventional war that would be so big that Americans would finally notice it as a result of personal privation (they didn't notice any economic privation even during Vietnam), I don't see how a conventional war against Russia in Europe would ever get anywhere near that scale before it went nuclear.
"Why do you think that there has been literally no move to reindustrialize on a meaningful basis in the last two years? " - Because Americans truly and genuinely believe their own propaganda for morons. They really believe Russia is on its last legs with a failing economy, a lack of weapons, a destroyed military and a totally inept officer corps with a failed dictator that Russian people hate at the helm.
Americans really think they're going to win any second now, as those doughy, democracy-loving Ukrainians continue to beat the heck out of those awful Russians. There's no US push to completely overturn the US economy and their country to avoid losing a world war with Russia because they totally believe they are a mighty power that can slap around Russia as it likes with what it has on hand.
Don't underestimate the revolutionary impact of the US so totally winning its information war on its own people. That is something rarely achieved in history, the total dominance of a completely fake narrative. It is so dominant that it is feeding back on itself, as US military "intelligence" uses "open source intelligence" to guide its own thinking without realizing that what it is using for OSINT is in fact the very lies it has itself planted. It looks like such a self-delusional feedback loop using fake OSINT the US itself planted was a factor in the defective intelligence that led to catastrophic losses for Kiev in the failed "counteroffensive" of 2023.
That's what makes this time so dangerous: the US is moving forward with war plans that are delusional. The US narrative says Russia is weak, on the ropes, and the people are about to rise up to topple Putin, so that's what they plan on. Object to that and your career is ruined for being a Putin puppet.
They don't understand the total resolve and unity of the Russian people. Even in your case, you don't understand to the marrow of your bones that Russia will use nukes to defend Kaliningrad if the US tries a serious attack. For US lightweights like Jake Sullivan or other advisors to the dimwits in Washington that's even less of a consideration and can easily be wished away. The result is that it is more likely the US will take actions that could result in Russian use of nukes.
Pointing out Russian resolve or US delusional thinking is not nuke mongering. That's just the extremely grave reality of what the situation is like today. Russians don't bluff. Putin didn't call for tactical nuclear drills to "send a message," he called for them because in the current situation he wants to be sure people can do their complex and demanding jobs effectively.
Use of nuclear weapons in the current war between the US and Russia is a very real possibility. I don't think their use is inevitable, but it is a dangerously high percentage, far more than before, and the odds of their use are headed in the wrong direction, towards inevitability.