> They acted like the goal was to step on Putin's toes without pissing him off too much...
I mean, when you're fighting a nuclear power, making sure you don't piss them off enough to make them use their nuclear weapons, or at least unleash their most powerful conventional weapons on your main cities, seems like a good strategy.
Imagine for a second that instead of Russia, it was the USA fighting a proxy war against, say, China. And that China had just provided the intelligence and maybe weapons for, say, Cuba to sink the largest US Carrier. I am very sure the USA would freaking unleash hell on Cuba, maybe also on China. The only reason the Russians didn't do the same is that they're probably not capable of doing so, at least not without losing too much for it to be a rational choice. But at the time, the USA was not entirely sure of what the Russians would do when provoked to such an extent. They were understandably worried. As they learned the Russians were not exactly doing what they might have expected, they gradually started pushing more and more up until the point the Russians launched an Oreshnic ballistic missile which could've easily been carrying a nuclear payload, but luckily didn't. Biden still pushed further a bit even after that, but in my opinion that was rather irresponsible. You can't push the Russians forever, even in their current position, before you should expect them to become desperate and start using whatever they can to start pushing back at you, and the Russians still can do that.
Nukes aren't that great a weapon to use against the country right on your border that you're trying to annex, especially if you've been busy justifying the invasion to your own population as liberation.
There are "tactical" nukes these days that can be "safely" used and in the beginning of the war, nobody was sure if the Russians were willing to use those. But even Hiroshima has recovered from a dirty nuke with relatively minor permanent losses.
I mean, when you're fighting a nuclear power, making sure you don't piss them off enough to make them use their nuclear weapons, or at least unleash their most powerful conventional weapons on your main cities, seems like a good strategy.
Imagine for a second that instead of Russia, it was the USA fighting a proxy war against, say, China. And that China had just provided the intelligence and maybe weapons for, say, Cuba to sink the largest US Carrier. I am very sure the USA would freaking unleash hell on Cuba, maybe also on China. The only reason the Russians didn't do the same is that they're probably not capable of doing so, at least not without losing too much for it to be a rational choice. But at the time, the USA was not entirely sure of what the Russians would do when provoked to such an extent. They were understandably worried. As they learned the Russians were not exactly doing what they might have expected, they gradually started pushing more and more up until the point the Russians launched an Oreshnic ballistic missile which could've easily been carrying a nuclear payload, but luckily didn't. Biden still pushed further a bit even after that, but in my opinion that was rather irresponsible. You can't push the Russians forever, even in their current position, before you should expect them to become desperate and start using whatever they can to start pushing back at you, and the Russians still can do that.