Crossing the Rubicon

Escalation, nuclear rhetoric as Putin digs in deeper and deeper

Last week saw a sequence of events that accelerated the war in Ukraine. The forced referenda in the occupied Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporozhia and Kherson regions paved the way for annexation, overruling international law. Next was the maybe not so mysterious attack on the Nord Stream pipelines. And on Friday the stage was Putin’s to not only confirm the annexation of the said areas, but also to launch a blistering attack, laced with warnings, on the West. And then on Saturday word reached us that one of the strategic strongholds in the just annexed Donetsk area - the city of Lyman - fell to Ukraine. You can call it a week of extremes. I see a drastic change in the dynamics of this conflict with hard to assess consequences.

Take the speech which makes for interesting reading: it frames the argument that the West is facing a collapse, but also points to the fact that nuclear weapons were first used by the allies after WWII. In other words, you started this so maybe now it is our turn to use them too. The language is so threatening that it makes our days with Soviet leaders Brezhnev and Andropov look like a time of some innocent differences of opinion among good friends. As always with Putin, he raises the stakes leaving himself and Russia no space to pick a safe off-ramp. No exit route and no route for compromise. It is all or nothing, win in Ukraine or exact maximum destruction on your eventual retreat. And the latter seems ever more likely if we look at the military state of affairs.

So that is the analysis as to why Russia would throw around its weight with nuclear weapons (tactical on the battlefield and supply lines, or more direct ones targeting civilian centres). At the same time the call to respond to this more pro-actively, ie. issue dire threats to Putin in return directly, is getting more traction. For one it will put the West on a more offensive footing by giving the Moscow leadership some datapoints to consider. Let me be clear, it is not issuing a simple retaliatory threat or a suggestion to launch a pre-emptive attack, but to deliver a direct description of what could happen if Russia were to act on its dangerous threats. Retired US general and former CIA chief David Petraeus (he of the Iraq war fame) lays out very clearly what NATO forces could bring about. It would involve a total destruction of Russia’s military capabilities.

It is hard to come to the realization that we have landed here. The Ukraine War felt like a regime change operation when Putin attacked in February and then it became a sort of stalemate with no easy way out. Now we see a strong Ukraine winning and a desperate Russia raising the ante. If even the Pope starts to weigh in on this, it is evident that we have landed in dangerous and unpredictable territory. May cooler heads and wisdom prevail in the weeks to come. Stay tuned.

Update: this morning news came out that Ukrainian troops also made some serious progress in the strategic Kherson region. We may have crossed the Rubicon in terms of ‘war rhetoric’, we may soon see Ukraine crossing the Dnipro river.