As I wrote in several articles months ago, the Joe Biden administration’s political wing kicked down the road until after the U.S. presidential election the escalation against Russia that allowing Kiev to hit the country with US ATACMs short- and/or long-range missiles would constitute (https://gordonhahn.com/2024/09/16/ukrainian-tipping-points-update-4-us-blocks-long-range-missile-attacks-until-after-elections/ and https://gordonhahn.com/2024/09/03/ukrainian-tipping-points-update/). It appears, as numerous reports indicate, that Biden has now approved the use of U.S. short-range ATACM missiles by Ukraine to target Russia on its pre-2022 territory, specifically in the Kursk salient, where Ukraine’s best brigades are about to be encircled or forced into retreat and destroyed.
Ukraine is incapable of launching ATACMs or British-French Stormshadow missiles without American military providing guidance, targeting, and programming data. This is why Russian President Vladimir Putin stated a few months ago, as I noted in the above mentioned articles, that states so facilitating Ukraine’s launch of such missiles targeting Russian territory would make themselves and their armed forces participating combatants in the war and so become to fair game for targetting by Russia’s armed forces.
In my first article on this subject when Western policymakers began broaching the issue seriously in September, I noted: “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” (https://gordonhahn.com/2024/09/03/ukrainian-tipping-points-update/).
Two weeks later I reiterated the point, noting: “The US has refrained from removing its prohibition on Ukraine’s use of US ATACM or JSSSAM long-range missiles against targets deep inside Russia’s pre-2014 territory. Against all military and political logic, the UK lobbied hard during its prime minister’s visit to Washington and had approved use of its Storm Shadow missiles for such use (https://ctrana.news/news/471905-london-razreshil-ukraine-bit-po-rossii.html). The US is operating under military and political logic. The Biden administration demanded that Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelenskiy present a list of potential Russian targets to the White House, after the Pentagon questioned the military utility of such attacks (https://ctrana.news/news/471904-ssha-trebujut-ot-kieva-stratehiju-dalnobojnykh-udarov-po-rf.html). Politically, as I noted, it is not in the Biden administration’s and Democratic party’s interest to have a crisis of a status of the Cuban Missile Crisis or have Ukrainian forces suffer a grave collapse before the November 5 presidential elections. This precluded any lifting of the prohibition before then, but afterwards things could change, and there those such as US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken and other neocons will be pressing hard to work out a reversal of this sane decision” (https://gordonhahn.com/2024/09/16/ukrainian-tipping-points-update-4-us-blocks-long-range-missile-attacks-until-after-elections/).
It should be noted that this combatant level participation in military conflict is occurring during the last weeks of a lame duck president without any discussion by the American people or its ostensible representatives in Congress. No war powers discussion is evident either. Moreover, the decision and its original delay in September mark another case in a now familiar and routine American government pattern of using foreign policy for domestic political purposes – as a ‚political football‘ if you will. In September, the decision was delayed so that it would not harm the Democrat Party’s presidential and other election candidates. Now, in November, it, along with a large, final aide package for Kiev, is being used to troll and undermine President-elect Donald Trump. Make no mistake, this is the tripe into which American politics has degraded. It is no accident that Biden ‚welcomed Trump back to the White House‘, being ever so nice and polite, and then stabbed him in the back two days with this leak to the New York Times in order to spite Trump and simultaneously complicate Trump’s push to put an end tot he NATO-Russia Ukrainian War. To be sure, some wanted to play this game, while others had a more strategic purpose of escalating the war against ‚Putin’s Russia.‘ Nevertheless, the domestic political component of all this is huge.
More globally, although this step – if the NYT peice is not another CIA-planted fake for propaganda purposes targeting both domestic and foreign politics, will not save Ukraine from ist dire fate, it will mark a key escalation. Putin is certain to consider the war even more than hitherto to be a war with the ‚collective West‘ more than one with Ukraine. After all, Great Britain and France followed suit after the American reports by approving use of their Stormshadow missiles on targets located in pre-2022 Russian territory. The good news is that the noted American and European missiles cannot hit Moscow or St. Petersburg, which would be another level of escalation. Still, provincial capitols, important military and installations and bases, and energy infrastructure can be expected to be hit first in Kursk but soon likely elsewhere, though Russian air defense has proven quite capable in intercepting the better portion of such missiles. Indeed, I would expect the Ukrainians to hit targets that are certain to involve significant casualties among Russian civilians as well as more purely military and military-related targets. Zelenskiy has claimed that the Russians deliberately target civilians, has willfully lied about them doing so in particular instances, and often stated that he wants ordinary Russians to ‚feel the war.‘
The Russian president may respond by hitting Western targets through proxies around the world, declaring war on Ukraine and repealing the ‘special military operation’, or even hitting targets in the West directly. Regardless, the pattern of escalation by ‘slowly boiling the frog‘ answered by Russian counter-escalations continues. And the power struggles in the U.S. are far from over, and as long as they continue to unfold in an anti-realist, anti-republican spirit they will force Russia to persist in seizing new Ukrainian territory and drive all the way to the Dnieper River and perhaps beyond, exacerbating international tensions and moving us closer to a major war. Biden has just slammed the door going out, and he is likely to do it some more.
But the most important consequence of Biden’s political tantrum is that it offers very limited military improvement while imparting a dangerous escalation in the NATO-Russian Ukrainian War. We have moved one step closer to the fulfilment of Zelenskiy’s dream of bringing NATO into the war, given the Biden missile approval followed by Putin’s new Russian nuclear doctrine, which holds any powers or blocs allied with and assisting a country attacking Russia responsible for such attacks and at war with Russia. The West’s ‘party of war’ was unable to defeat Trump at the polls, so it has opted to anger Putin such that he will reject the next president’s peace overtures. The most disconcerting possibility in this regard is that some in Moscow will be counseling Putin that Biden and Trump are playing ‘good cop/bad cop, so Washington can continue trying to move the ball closer to the end zone – the neocon holy grail of a strategic defeat of Russia.
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NEW BOOK
EUROPE BOOKS, 2022
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RECENT BOOKS
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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.