The Western world seems to have taken another dangerous step in the war in Ukraine. The collective West has provided Ukraine with relatively long-range missiles that will allow Kiev to hit targets on Russian territory. With these weapons systems, Ukraine will now be able to hit targets in Russia. Indeed, it has already struck several targets in recent weeks. In particular, the UCAV attack on Russia’s nuclear missile early warning system has generated a lot of news and commentary, and there has been much discussion about how such actions would be received in Russia.
These reports should be analysed from two perspectives. One is that the Western world has been crossing its own red lines one by one since the beginning of the war, and the other is what effect these efforts have had, or could have, on the course of the war… At the beginning of the war it was almost taboo to give F-16s to Ukraine. Western leaders kept repeating that such a thing would not/should not happen. Over time, however, it has gone beyond the provision of F-16s. Today, it is not only the use of ATACMS missiles against Russian (or often civilian) forces on Ukrainian territory, but also the use of these missiles to hit points on Russian territory. Moreover, Ukraine has already begun to do so. In other words, the West initially underestimated Russia in military terms, as it did in the area of economic sanctions. It seems to have acted under the influence of its own propaganda.
The second question is how much these efforts will affect the war on the ground… Or whether they will affect it at all… Because from the point of view of the collective West, the war in Ukraine is lost. It was already clear that the exaggerated goals set at the beginning of the war would not be achieved. The effective and de facto return to Ukrainian sovereignty of the two ‘republics’ in the Donbass region, which were or are out of Ukrainian control through armed clashes, and the ‘conquest’ of Crimea by Kiev were constantly stated by both Ukraine and the Collective West as the aims of the war. In a Russia pushed back from Ukrainian territory, the government would be overthrown as a result of the possible social unrest that would erupt in Russia, and Putin would be tried as a war criminal in the International Criminal Court (ICC). Even the disintegration of Russia and the seizure of much of its unlimited resources were part of these dreams; but it has not happened, and it is highly likely that it will not happen.
Russia has de facto won the war, but…
Russia won the war de facto. It has not collapsed economically. On the contrary, those who imposed sanctions, especially the European countries, are facing serious economic difficulties. Normally, in such a situation, one would have expected diplomacy to have stepped in long ago and tried to reach a comprehensive compromise with a ceasefire. It should have worked hard to implement the Minsk agreements (2004 and 2005) or to come up with a text similar to the one that was paraphrased in Istanbul in April 2022, just two months after the start of the war. From the moment the Cuban missile crisis broke out (October 1962), there was behind-the-scenes diplomacy, and the crisis was resolved in a few weeks with a compromise as a result of the diplomatic efforts of US President John F. Kennedy on the one hand, Soviet leader Khrushchev on the other, and the foreign ministers and Kennedy’s brother Zinoviev, the US ambassador in Washington, who was Kennedy’s justice minister.
In other words, one party could not dictate its will to the other. Moreover, at the time of the crisis, the United States had an overwhelming three-to-one advantage over the Soviet Union in nuclear weapons since 1962. Now, despite the fact that Russia has a serious superiority over the collective West (the US, UK and France) in terms of the total number of nuclear warheads, their destructive power and delivery systems, America and its allies have closed the door to negotiations since the beginning of the war. The war will continue until Russia is expelled from all Ukrainian territory and Crimea comes under the effective sovereignty of Kiev… What will happen next can be seen in the ICC’s decision to arrest Putin and the statements by Western, especially Eastern, think tanks and officials to dismember Russia.
How far will the escalation go?
In short, the collective West sees negotiations with Russia or Ukraine as a confirmation of the collapse of the unipolar world order. The exaggerated goals they declared at the beginning of the war are also an obstacle to negotiations. For example, although the Russian side repeatedly and extensively explained before and after the start of the war why it was forced into this war, which it called a special military operation, it never publicly announced where the operation would end. Thus, when it came to the negotiating table – and it constantly emphasised its willingness to do so – it did not explain how it could or could not negotiate except on vital issues. On the other hand, Western officials and the Western media, in order to persuade their own public opinion in favour of aid to Ukraine, babbled on and on about the imminent economic collapse of Russia and the destruction of the Russian armed forces, which they claimed were already militarily inferior.
This has made the Western world, at least for the current leadership, psychologically very far from accepting a Russian victory in Ukraine. This leads to a policy of escalation whenever the Ukrainian counter-offensive, which was widely reported in the Western media last year, fails to produce the desired results, or whenever there are signs of collapse and disintegration in the Ukrainian army. As long as the Ukrainian leadership continues to say ‘give us money and weapons and we will fight and deal with it’, this policy will continue, but it is not clear how far this policy of escalation can be sustained. On the other hand, how Russia might respond is also an issue that needs to be addressed.
For example, if Ukraine uses Western weapons systems to hit targets inside Russia, will they be used entirely by the Ukrainian armed forces or by personnel from Western countries who are there as advisers, etc.? Given that it is highly unlikely that they will change the course of the war on the ground, will the Western powers in the next phase send their own personnel to Ukraine and organise attacks against Russia with them?
These questions are quite pertinent, as the collective West has crossed all the red lines that were considered taboo at the beginning of the Ukrainian war. And the most important question: At what point can Russia, which is trying to respond coolly to all these Western initiatives, pull the trigger on nuclear weapons? This is because Moscow has repeatedly stated that it will (not that it can) respond with tactical nuclear weapons if it is attacked with conventional weapons and a policy of escalation, justifying this with the assessment that it would be impossible for it to accept losing the war. Since it is clear what would happen to Russia if it lost the war, it is out of the question for Moscow to consider such a scenario as a possibility.
The statements of the war-mongering European leaders that if the war in Ukraine is lost, Putin will accelerate his expansionist policy and invade Poland and Romania, starting from the Baltics, are, for those who follow the issues closely, far behind even the coffee-table talk in Turkey, but it is interesting that the Secretary General of NATO and the leaders/officials of the European Union are trying to spread this fear. One side of this is certainly to make American companies happy by persuading the people of these countries to buy weapons, but it is also important that more sensible leaders, especially Orban, insist that Europe is preparing for war and that Hungary will be kept out of such a catastrophe no matter what. Similar statements have been made repeatedly by the Slovak Prime Minister Fico, who was assassinated, and by the Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze, who is trying to register the foreign funding of NGOs in Georgia, who has repeatedly and explicitly stated that they want to use his country as a second front against Russia and that NGOs are being used for this purpose.
Could it be that these dangerous initiatives, which are likely to change radically if Trump is elected and puts into practice what he is now saying will be US policy, are designed to force Russia to use tactical nuclear weapons before he arrives? Or is it possible to assume that Russia will not resort to nuclear weapons in any case? It should be stressed that we are no longer in a position to say no to any conspiracy scenario. While the US Deep State is doing its best to prevent Trump from coming to power, Trump continues to say that he will destroy this Deep State by openly naming it; however, it is clear that some things are not/will not be a joke. One of the most important of these has to be nuclear weapons.
