On the worst case – Friedman in NYT:

‘Poland is a NATO member, and any attack on its territory would require every other NATO member to come to Poland’s defense. Putin may believe that if he can force that issue, and some NATO members balk at defending Poland, NATO could fracture. It would certainly trigger heated debates inside every NATO country — especially in the United States — about getting directly involved in a potential World War III with Russia. No matter what happens in Ukraine, if Putin could splinter NATO, that would be an achievement that could mask all his other losses.
If Putin’s plans A, B and C all fail, though, I fear that he would be a cornered animal and he could opt for plan D — launching either chemical weapons or the first nuclear bomb since Nagasaki. That is a hard sentence to write, and an even worse one to contemplate. But to ignore it as a possibility would be naïve in the extreme.’

Read the article here.

As always with Friedman, there is a whole collection of tired cliches in most paragraphs, but the idea that Putin might attack Poland just to see whether he can divide NATO (and dividing NATO is turning NATO into an obsolete animal) is an interesting thought.

I don’t think he will do that. The gamble is a bit too risky. Above all, Biden is not willing to start a war - probably a world war - for Ukraine, but he is not letting America’s empire going down the drain in the name of appeasement.

Also, Putin might not have conquered Ukraine in two days, but he is not losing any Russian territory, au contraire, he might get Crimea officially as a gesture from the West, in return for not winning the war.

The Russian army is according to most reports underperforming, but that’s mainly because the expectations were high and rightly so. After all, Russia.
Well, Russia did win the war in Syria, but that war was not Russia’s war alone, Putin stepped in to help comrade Assad stay in power, and the West was secretly happy that Putin did the dirty work for them. As I wrote before, they reached the conclusions war criminal Assad is better than all other options available.

A last note, Putin is not an island. I don’t see a coup in Moscow coming, who does, but the moment when Putin starts an offensive that might endanger Russia itself, for example by attacking Poland, I expect the military and economic establishment in Russia to take measures against Putin.
Morality is not in play here.
Just self-preservation, but sometimes self-preservation and morality are more or less the same.