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Russia officially annexed parts of Ukraine, so under Russian doctrine a US/NATO intervention that aimed to retake Crimea or the other oblasts would be (under Russian thinking) an attack on Russia proper, wouldn't it?
Russian "escalate to deescalate" doctrine would likely involve using tactical, low-yield nuclear weapons on a military target set and then daring NATO to end history by starting a real nuclear war. Or at least that's the theory – who knows what would happen in real life.
I think Trump would try to do what he did when he was in office last time (choke Ukrainian military aid, threaten Putin with insane military escalation) and force a frozen conflict, but that's just a guess.
Given that (as per Western/NATO-aligned sources) the Russians have been shooting down US anti-radiation (IOW, anti-air-defense) and surface-to-surface missiles in Ukraine on the regular, I'm not convinced that an air campaign (which would use munitions we probably have earmarked for a Pacific war) would be an easy and quick fix, even if it was ultimately effective. Similarly the Poles certainly have a very significant military, but (based on a quick glance) they've already donated about a third of their tank inventory (300+) to Ukraine. I can see a world where throwing their remaining 600ish at the Russian army (which IIRC is now about 15% larger than it was at the beginning of the invasion, as per the DoD) results in them getting ground down over the course of several months or years the same way the much larger Ukrainian army has been attrited.
If the annexed territories are ‘officially’ part of Russia, why hasn’t Russia nuked Kiev for invading its sovereign territory?
It’s a bluff, it always was. If NATO tanks roll in from Poland, Russia will choose retreat over nuclear Armageddon.
Because it thinks it can win a conventional war with Kiev (and anyway even if it couldn't Kiev doesn't pose quite the threat NATO does.) War with NATO would be (understatement of the week) a much dicier proposition. It's quite possible that you're right and that they would retreat.
But understand that the idea everyone has from the Cold War about how nuclear war consists of hundreds of ICBM launches isn't necessarily accurate. NATO and the Soviet Union both planned on using tactical nuclear weapons in the event of any large-scale confrontation during the Cold War, and they didn't necessarily think this meant Armageddon, although they were cognizant of the risks. Ships routinely deployed with nuclear weapons meant to be used against individual submarines (probably our only means of catching some of the faster Russian submarines for a time.) These weapons weren't weapons of mass destruction in the city-destroying sense; they were used because their explosive yield (by weight) was needed for certain tactical applications (e.g. ensuring an aircraft carrier was sunk, or that a submarine was caught in the kill zone of a depth charge.)
If NATO tanks roll in from Poland, and Russia decides its conventional forces won't cut it but it wants to stick it out, it most likely will fire a low-yield weapon from tube artillery or a cruise/theatre ballistic missile at NATO troops on the ground or at another military target, e.g. a Polish airbase. These weapons are tremendously destructive, but only in a very localized area (think of it as deleting one bunker, or putting a single airbase out of commission. They wouldn't be especially effective against troops on the ground unless they were in a tight formation.) In the past during US exercises, the US response to this has been to launch their own tactical nuclear weapon in response, not to open the ICBM tubes.
The US is skittish about using nuclear weapons on Russian soil (in one past exercise they retaliated with a nuclear weapon launched on a target inside neutral Belarus) so one possible outcome to all of this is that all nuclear weapons are targeted at conventional Russian/NATO forces inside Ukraine in a "non-escalatory" fashion until one side cries uncle.
TLDR; we could all plausibly live through a nuclear war with hundreds of nuclear detonation without any nuclear Armageddon, or even mass civilian casualties. Life in most of the world would continue on as it had, but there would be thousands and thousands of dead Poles (and thousands more dead Russians.)
Honestly as much as Russia waving the nuclear saber is a visible prospect in light of current stated and anticipated hostilities, we all seem to forget the most likely course of nuclear apocalypse: nuclear armed retards. India and Pakistan could have absolutely nuked the shit out of each other back in 2022 when India accidentally launched a Brahmos at Pakistan and the Pakistanis were too asleep at the wheel to respond. If the Pakistanis were more on the ball, we really would have seen the first nuclear incident since Hiroshima/Nagasaki, all thanks to fucktards inheriting toys from their forebears
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