Rewarding Russia’s nuclear blackmail will be catastrophic and guarantee nuclear proliferation. Seeing that it is effective policy every tin pot dictator will nuke up and sooner will later somebody will use them.
Precisely, and considering that Russia's supporters include China, North Korea, and Iran, I cannot fathom how anyone who professes to care about this country argues that we back down to these threats. Because if it works for Russia, rogue nations like Iran and North Korea are going to be next, and they're just nutty enough to actually pull the trigger.
That has been the case for decades.
What's new about that? And Russia doesn't need to blackmail anybody over nukes. They've had nukes almost as long as we have, and still have the most powerful nuclear arsenal on the planet.