I agree with you, nuclear response would make things very difficult with China and their allies, but there’s plenty of traditional firepower available directed to Russia if things escalate to that point and should Russia attack with nukes I don’t think they’ll have a lot of support for their actions from the east. And triggering nuclear response would likely end up in a MAD scenario which is something I think (and hope) no one really wants to see trough.
But that still leaves a pretty big field to work with traditional ammunition and a skilled pilot from Sweden could still reach Moscow in 20 minutes or so to turn multiple military targets within the city into a rubble. And there’s plenty of airfields closer than Stockholm with equally capable fighter jets. For the ground force, Finns and Estonians could at least in theory reach Moscow in 10-12 hours since majority of troops defending it are already down on some field in Ukraine and our artillery forces move pretty damn fast.
The amount of destruction Russia could cause is of course still an enormous humanitarian crisis, but even if they could turn Kiyv to wasteland (and kill millions while doing it), it still wouldn’t change the outcome of full Nato response without any bullshit politics limiting on actions if anyone is allowed to strike on the Russian soil.
And that subset of people needs to have at least some kind of mindset to learn the viable minimum skills to even start with and a will to learn more and more and more. I’ve done various kinds of hosting as a career for couple of decades and as things change I’m fighting myself if it’s worth my time and effort to keep my home services running or should I just throw money to google/apple/microsoft/whoever to store my stuff and manage my IOT stuff and throw the hardware into recycling bin.
I have the skill set required for whatever my home network might need up to a point that I could somewhat easily host a small village from my home (money is of course a barrier after a certain point), but I find myself more and more often thinking if it’s worth the effort. My Z-wave setup needs some TLC as something isn’t playing nicely and it causes all kinds of problems with my automations, my wifi network could use a couple of sockets on the walls to work better, I should replace my NVR with something open source to include couple of more cameras around the yard and have better movement recognition and cameras should go to their own VLAN and so on.
Most of that stuff is pretty basic to set up and configure (well, that z-wave network is a bit of it’s own thing to manage) and it would actually be pretty nice to have all the things working as they should and expand on what I have to make my everyday life even more simpler than it already is. But as there’s a ton of things going on in life I just rather spend few hours gaming from my sofa than tinker with something.
That’s of course just me, if you get your reward and enjoyement on your network then good for you. Personally I think I’ll keep various things running around, but right now in this place I’m at, the self hosting, home network and automation and all that is more of a chore than a hobby. And I’m pretty sure I don’t like it.