World War III Watch: “Well boys, I reckon this is it. Nuclear combat toe-to-toe with the Russkies!”

The Snowball Summit was over quickly, and now President Trump is scheduled to meet Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in Washington on Monday. Then additional European leaders will join in the fun. From The New York Times:

European leaders are set to join Zelensky for Ukraine meeting with Trump.

by Constant Méheut and Enjoli Liston | Sunday, August 17, 2025

European leaders said on Sunday that they would join President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine when he meets with President Trump on Monday at the White House, as they strive to show solidarity against Russia and avoid being sidelined in peace talks.

“Our goal tomorrow is to present a united front between Europeans and Ukrainians,” President Emmanuel Macron of France told reporters. “I don’t believe Putin wants peace. I believe he wants Ukraine’s capitulation.”

Mr. Macron will be one of at least six European leaders — including Prime Minister Keir Starmer of Britain and President Alexander Stubb of Finland, two of Mr. Trump’s favored counterparts — traveling to Washington. The trip highlights the continent’s effort to smooth relations between Mr. Trump and Mr. Zelensky, whose last White House meeting in February descended into a public clash.

European leaders have spent months cultivating ties with Mr. Trump to strengthen their hand in pressing Ukraine’s case, while also coaching Mr. Zelensky on how to better engage with Mr. Trump. On Sunday, the Europeans and other partners met online and in person with Mr. Zelensky to prepare for the meeting in Washington.

There’s more at the original, and, being part of a continually updated article, it might be different from what I copied and pasted at press time.

But there’s one question that sticks in my mind: what is it that the European leaders are prepared to actually do to somehow turn the tide and enable Ukraine to win against Russia? President Trump campaigned on backing off of President Biden’s half-hearted support for Ukraine, in the direction of the United States disengaging from that support, and Mr Trump was elected 10½ months ago, yet, in all of that time, despite a flurry of words, they’ve done little to increase practical support for Ukraine, done little to help Ukraine succeed on the battlefield. Today we’re 3½ years into this war, and while Russia certainly has not won, neither has Ukraine; it has been mostly a stalemate, though the Times has reported that Russia is starting to develop a militarily effective edge, while Ukraine’s serious manpower shortage has been known for months. I have said it many times previously: Ukraine cannot win its war against Russia without the United States and/or NATO sending real combat troops to directly fight the Russians.

“Well boys, I reckon this is it. Nuclear combat toe-to-toe with the Russkies!” — Major Kong in Dr Strangelove

At some point, the European leaders, who have been raising the specter of Soviet Russian tanks pouring through the Fulda Gap to invade western Europe, despite Russia’s inability to conquer all of Ukraine, need to have put forth a workable plan to help defeat Russia, but if they have one, they haven’t implemented, or even unveiled it. With Russia’s earlier ineptitude on the battlefield, something which Russia is finally turning around, the time to have done something other than just send limited arms, equipment, and money to Kiev passed years ago, when Joe Biden was still our President, but they did little.

Now the European leaders want to at least scale back President Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin’s proposals for a ceasefire, instead pushing demands which at least seem to include at least some Russian withdrawals, at least some Russian surrender of territories that Ukraine has not been able to retake on the battlefield. But, unless they are willing to commit actual combat troops or combat aircraft to directly fight the Russians, a huge escalation of the war against a nation with a strategic and tactical nuclear arsenal, I, at the very least, have been unable to see what more they could do.

In the heat of August, it doesn’t seem like much of a concern, but winter is coming, and a cut off of Russian natural gas to western Europe — something our European allies have been buying all along — would leave the Europeans freezing to death in January and February.

But the problem is even simpler than that. Russia has thousands of ‘battlefield’ or ‘tactical’ nuclear weapons left over from the Cold War. Can you imagine what the reaction of our NATO allies would be if Vladimir Vladimirovich used just one against a NATO troop concentration in Ukraine? It wouldn’t be an attack on a NATO nation, something which triggers the North Atlantic Treaty, but something in an existing war into which NATO got involved lately. If NATO troops were pushing the Russians back, is it so unimaginable that Vladimir Vladimirovich would consider what we’d see as a desperation move?

Well, I can imagine what would happen: European leaders across the continent would be defecating in their drawers! While the United States does have the weaponry to respond in kind, the two nuclear powers in European NATO, the United Kingdom and France, have only strategic nuclear weapons, the launch-it-against-Moscow types of nukes.