jackk, re: no fly zone
2 days ago, David Deptula (who ran no-fly zone over Iraq) was answering questions about that. He does not dismiss it, just says it is a complicated operation, requiring defining the rules and risks of escalation.
He concludes with ambiguity: there could be a “nuanced option” that might permit a limited no-fly z one. “If proposed by the [European Union] or the United Nations, if there was established a humanitarian exclusion zone from conflict in western Ukraine, one might posit that one could establish a no-fly zone there,” he said. “But you’d still want to have a degree of strategic ambiguity over who’s going to enforce that to get around the complication of NATO and Russian forces directly engaging one another…But even that becomes difficult.”