In the last few hours, both Russian President Vladimir Putin and Russia’s Ambassador to the United Nations have declared that any attack on Russia by Ukraine with Western long-range missiles will be considered by Moscow to be the direct participation of the country from which the weapon has been supplied and will be met with “corresponding measures with all the ensuing consequences” for that particular state. Putin, in particular noted that such an act will “change the very essence, nature if the war” (http://kremlin.ru/events/president/news/75092).
UPDATE 2:
Outgoing US President Joe Biden has said his administration is working on approval of Ukrainian use of U.S. long-range missiles against targets deep inside Russia (https://www.ft.com/content/48289996-e1bf-4c3e-befb-031698e89e1b). The UK is pressuring the US to approve such use, and US Secretary of State and UK’s foreign minister have just arrived in Kiev (https://ctrana.news/news/471869-blinken-i-hlava-mid-britanii-pribyli-v-kiev.html).
UPDATE 1:
Rueters reports US is just about se to send long-range missiles to Ukraine for attacks deep inside Russia:
US close to agreeing on long-range missiles for Ukraine; delivery to take months
Summary
-Stealthy JASSM weapons have range to hit targets inside Russia
-Decision expected in autumn, U.S. officials say
-Pentagon trying to integrate JASSMs on Soviet-era Ukrainian jets
WASHINGTON, Sept 3 (Reuters) – The U.S. is close to an agreement to give Ukraine long-range cruise missiles that could reach deep into Russia, but Kyiv would need to wait several months as the U.S. works through technical issues ahead of any shipment, U.S. officials said.The inclusion of Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missiles (JASSM) in a weapons package is expected to be announced this autumn, three sources said, though a final decision has not been made (https://www.reuters.com/world/us-close-agreeing-long-range-missiles-ukraine-delivery-take-months-2024-09-03/).
ORIGINAL ARTICLE:
The NATO-Russia Ukrainian war is at a tipping point; one that leads to a Russian march to the Dniepr River and the relocation of what remains of pro-NATO Ukraine’s populace to right bank Ukraine and its Maidan government away from the western banks of the Diner and deeper into western Ukraine, likely Lvov. Not surprisingly, Kiev therefore is desperate and trying to escalate in ways that implicate or bring deeper, more direct NATO involvement, which has been deep and escalating on NATO’s part for years. For Kiev, ideal would be a full-scale NATO military intervention. The West’s previous strategy of gradual escalation – ‘boiling the frog’ by providing redlined air defense systems, then short-range missile/artillery systems, then tanks, then F-16s – has run its course. The only options now are permitting Kiev to use Western missiles to hit deep inside Russia and target Russian President Vladimir Putin and other top leaders. Until now neither Kiev nor the West has crossed any Russian or ‘Putin red lines’ because there have not been any Russian-declared ‘red lines’ but Western MSM-set red lines. One would-be hard-pressed to cite even one clearly expressed Putin ‘red line.’ I fear the Western escalation will continue up to crossing an actual ‘red line’ that Russians have indirectly hinted at – Ukraine’s use of long-range Western missiles such as American ATACMs and British Storm Shadows to strike deep into Russia – will be crossed one way or another, likely after the U.S. presidential election on November 5th.
The crossing of all previous red lines drawn largely by Western media produce a demonstration effect of supposed Russian weakness, which many play up in order to also facilitate a NATO decision to cross the long-range missile red line or to intervene overtly and officially on the ground in the war. The latter has been Volodomyr Zelenskiy’s goal since the war began and even before during the Minsk ‘ceasefire’. The repeated targeting of civilian areas in Donbass and now in Russia proper, bombing harvesting combines in Belgorod, and the now failed Kursk invasion itself is of the same genre. This desire, indeed desparate need to draw NATO ‘all in’ stands behind Zelenskiy’s fakes –Bucha, Russia attacked Zaporozhe Nuclear Power Plant Rus controls, a children’s hospital, schools, the Kramatorsk train station, etc., etc. This fakery is all part and parcel of the simulated reality that has been the Maidan and its resulting regime, built on legends of police brutality and mass shooting perpetrated by the Maidanists themselves.
Western propagandists use the alleged ‘failure of Putin to respond’ to Western-created ‘Putin red lines’ and to West-Ukraine provocations in order to give the impression that Russia is a paper bear and beatable, that Ukraine is winning and can win, and that the West and Ukraine should continue escalating and intensify its support and perhaps have NATO intervene full-scale. Zelensky himself – the premier propagandist and stage director in today’s West — has pointed to the mini-invasion into Kursk as proof that Moscow’s ‘red lines’ are “illusory” and appealed to the leaders of Britain, France, Germany, and the US to allow the use of long-range missiles to strike air bases on Russian territory (www.thetimes.com/world/russia-ukraine-war/article/kursk-incursion-proves-putins-red-lines-are-a-bluff-says-zelensky-bdc893ztw). Even if the U.S. and all NATO refuse approval of the use of their missiles for strikes deep into Russia, Zelenskiy’s long-pursued goal of drawing NATO into the war suggests the Ukrainians might very well attempt to fire them on their own somehow.
At the same time, the West has played up ‘Putin’s nuclear threats’ – of which there have been none. Russia has a clearly stated and codified nuclear use doctrine: nuclear weapons will be used only in the event of an existential threat to the survival of the Russian state. None exists yet, though this is a matter of interpretation and argumentation. The calculated rationale behind these false Western claims is to discredit the very rational Putin as some sort of mad man and anti-Christ. The more likely Russian escalation to come – and there are many options (symmetrical and asymmetrical alike) – to any missile strikes on Moscow or St. Petersburg will be a devastating blow to Kiev and other Ukrainian decision-making centers that will be designed to destroy in full central Kiev’s government buildings such as the Office of the President, the Verkhovna Rada, the government building, SBU, General Staff, and Defense Ministry buildings and such. This could precede or shortly follow a rapidly adopted declaration of war on Ukraine, ending the ‘special military operation’ and its relative restraint. In addition, the Russians will hunt to kill Zelenskiy and his colleagues.
So far, Washington has conducted a controlled but likely open-ended escalation until dominance is achieved; hence the relative U.S. restraint and its constraining of the UK, Poland, and others hitherto. But this restraint and constraint should not be overdrawn. The U.S. will escalate as far as is imaginable if it is safe to do so in order to deal a ‘strategic defeat’ to ‘Putin’s Russia.’ An inkling of what is to come can be seen with Washington’s recently announced plans to install nuclear cruise missiles in Germany, compounding the provocative miscue of placing ostensibly defensive, but potentially offensive missiles in Poland and Romania. The new ‘cold’ war is a “long war” as Washington has defined it.
Thus, the defeat of Kiev on the left bank augurs for a long standoff with Western support for continuing attacks of various kinds across the Dniepr against Russian-controlled eastern Ukraine that will likely lead to a second phase of the war in right bank Ukraine. The only way to avoid this outcome is by way of a negotiated treaty involving at least Kiev and Moscow; the West is an unlikely partner in a peace endeavor, given the chaos now reigning in Washington. Washington will prefer a Russian quagmire in Ukraine as a way to intensify Russian agony and angst in an attempt to outlast the aging Putin, parlaying these into a Russian succession crisis, which could provide an opening for a re-start of outright war and Maidan’s retaking of eastern Ukraine. The attempt will revive the risk of a larger NATO-Russia war, perhaps extending far beyond Ukraine.
The threat of such developments is peaking now. Zelenskiy and the Ukrainians are desparate given the not-so-long-coming collapse of Ukraine’s defense across the entire front; hence the desparate throw of the dice that is the Kursk invasion—a last desparate attempt to turn the tables on Moscow. For nearly a year and a half, Russia has been on a gradually mounting counter-offensive, even as it defeated last summer’s Ukrainian offensive in Kherson. Since Russia’s seizure of the Donbass town of Bakhmut (Artemovsk) in May 2023, Russian forces have been taking villages and towns one after the other. In March of this year the powerful Ukrainian stronghold in the town of Avdiivka fell. Since then, Russia forces have been gradually increasing the pace of its territorial advance and attrition of Ukrainian forces. Under what I have called Russia‘s ‘attrit and advance‘ operational strategy, Putin‘s forces have arrived at the gates of the strategic hub of Pokrovsk 50 miles west of Avdiivka. There is only one place where Ukrainian forces can set up a relatively strong defense line after Pokrovsk. That is at Pavlograd some 60 miles farther west. After that the road is open to the Dniepr River (30 miles to the west from Pavlograd) and the industrial stronghold of Dnepro (Dnepropetrovsk). So Russian forces have advanced some 50 miles in 5 months — 10 miles per month. At that pace, Russian forces would be at the Dneipr by next summer at the latest. But this will likely occur early next year, because Russian army is strengthening, while Ukraine’s is weakening. Russia’s advance has been accelerating over the last year because of this disparity, and the disparity itself is growing. Ukraine will soon be out of trained soldiers and wasted a large amount – perhaps 17,000 – on the doomed Kursk incursion. The shortage of ammunition and weapons has been growing, and the recent Western refusal to send more weapons in anything close to a significant amount means the weapons gap is intensifying as well. The Ukrainian army is doomed.
Kursk may produce another few isolated tranches of Western assistance but that will do little to put off the arrival of Russian troops at the Dnepr River, even perhaps before the New Year. As I have argued for a year, the West no longer has sufficient weapons or means – aside from tactical nukes or a full-scale NATO invasion — to change the battlefield equation and help Ukraine hold the line. It was clear many months ago that Russia’s territorial advance and attrition of Ukrainian forces would gradually increase, as I then stated. Paid liars from Washington, Stanford, London and elsewhere have tried and likely will continue to try to tell you ‘Ukraine is winning’. It is not and cannot do so without a full-scale NATO intervention and a likely resulting World War III.
Western ‘experts’ and intel propagandists have failed Ukraine and their own peoples by their ignorance of Russia and their professional malfeasance. They have misunderstood and underestimated Russia for 35 years from her lack of self-identity to inevitable ‘transitions’ to American-style governance and from the ‘failed transition’ to a totalitarian caricature of Putin’s reborn, rather soft authoritarianism and neo-traditionalist culture. They underestimated how Russia would respond to NATO expansion and the broken promise it entailed, a Western-backed. They underestimated Russia’s reaction to the neofascist-led putsch in Kiev and the betrayal of another agreement that promised an end to the crisis the West nurtured, to the US- and Western-backed failure of Kiev to live up to its obligations under the 2015 Minsk peace accords, to the US and West’s training and equipping Ukraine to de factoNATO member status from 2014-2022, and to the January 2022 declaration to Putin that the US was reneging on Biden’s December 2021 promise of no missiles in Ukraine. Now they will underestimate the risks of a new nuclear confrontation with Russia in Europe combined with a long war with Russia in Ukraine by way of NATO-supported guerrilla and terrorist partisan warfare carried out by Ukraine’s most committed element—its ultranationalists and neofascists. It is they who will likely succeed the Zelenskiy-Maidan regime—the last phase of the hybrid oligarch-ultranationalist phase before the truly ‘nationalist’ revolution led by real extremists.
The grave failure of Western rusology, academia, and government, I suspect, is bringing the world back to schism and nuclear confrontation. This failure will bring another Western or Western-induced Ukrainian escalation in autumn leading in response to an escalation by Russia perhaps involving an official Russian declaration of war on Ukraine and/or the targeting Kiev’s ‘decision-making centers.’ The U.S. Democrat Party-state and the media-academic-military-industrial-congressional complex cannot allow prior to the presidential election neither an obvious Ukrainian collapse to materialize as an ‘October surprise’ nor a major escalation that brings war or clearly risks U.S. troops or the homeland.
But there should be no doubt; there are domestic options of an escalatory nature being examined in Western decision-making and research centers. When one of the next Western or Western-backed Ukrainian escalations is enacted – regardless if it is engineered under a Trump or Harris administration or the guise thereof – there will follow, as sure as night follows day, a Russian response targeting not just ruined, disappearing Ukraine but the West.
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NEW BOOK
EUROPE BOOKS, 2022
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RECENT BOOKS
MCFARLAND BOOKS, 2021
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MCFARLAND BOOKS, 2018
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About the Author –
Gordon M. Hahn, Ph.D., is an Expert Analyst at Corr Analytics, www.canalyt.com. Websites: Russian and Eurasian Politics, gordonhahn.com and gordonhahn.academia.edu
Dr. Hahn is the author of the new book: Russian Tselostnost’: Wholeness in Russian Thought, Culture, History, and Politics (Europe Books, 2022). He has authored five previous, well-received books: The Russian Dilemma: Security, Vigilance, and Relations with the West from Ivan III to Putin (McFarland, 2021); Ukraine Over the Edge: Russia, the West, and the “New Cold War” (McFarland, 2018); The Caucasus Emirate Mujahedin: Global Jihadism in Russia’s North Caucasus and Beyond (McFarland, 2014), Russia’s Islamic Threat (Yale University Press, 2007), and Russia’s Revolution From Above: Reform, Transition and Revolution in the Fall of the Soviet Communist Regime, 1985-2000 (Transaction, 2002). He also has published numerous think tank reports, academic articles, analyses, and commentaries in both English and Russian language media.
Dr. Hahn taught at Boston, American, Stanford, San Jose State, and San Francisco State Universities and as a Fulbright Scholar at Saint Petersburg State University, Russia and was a senior associate and visiting fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Kennan Institute in Washington DC, the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, and the Center for Terrorism and Intelligence Studies (CETIS), Akribis Group.