The reason why Russia invaded Ukraine wasn't because of NATO but to maintain their sphere of influence, and apparently reclaim the Russian empire.[1] Indeed, it is Russia's greatest strategic mistake if they wish to push against the expansion of NATO. Sweden and Finland joined, and the Eastern Europeans are particularly vocal in their support of Ukraine and why they joined NATO in the first place.
Moreover, it wouldn't be in our interest to let another state invade another state for the express purpose of annexation and regime change. Our answer at minimum, must be the sanction of said state. If necessary, we will strangle their growth until they become like North Korea. Otherwise, our toleration will leads to further wars down the line and would be contrary to our democratic values and to the rule based international order.
I wouldn't also be too worried about WW3. It is unlikely that France would be involved, but it is clear that nukes is something that states are weary of, with good reason. I would call that nuclear blackmail which hobbled supporting Ukraine.
Recall the difficulty of getting Germany to send tanks or the controversy on the use of missiles like Storm Shadows. Now the British allowed the Ukrainian to use those missiles in attack on Russian territory. This is known as the escalation ladder and Russia seems to have a weaker hand since they backed down every time.
Russia's greatest strategic mistake if they wish to push against the expansion of NATO.
The Ukraine war isn't about NATO, of course, any more than it was about Nazis.
It also wasn't a mistake. They aren't in it to win. I believe that Putin is deliberately trying to turn his country into a failed state that the rest of the world will have no choice but to prop up.
When you realize that it is Putin who looks at Kim with envy, and not the other way around, a lot of seemingly-nonsensical things abruptly begin to make sense.
Not to complain about voting, but interestingly, I've advanced this theory multiple times on multiple venues and it gets downvoted without comment each time. Can't anyone actually come up with a counterargument, just for discussion's sake? Or simply ask a question that the proposal doesn't answer adequately?
I can't think of such a question, and apparently neither can anyone else. The only admissible conclusion is that Putin wants to turn Russia into North Korea.
> For that matter Russia made it clear that Ukraine in NATO was a redline since basically forever. An interesting aside is that that cable was written by William Burns, current head of the CIA who was, at the time, the US diplomat to Russia. Well we moved ahead to include Ukraine in NATO, and here we are.
That is not what happened. Ukraine and Georgia applied for NATO membership in 2008, but at Russian pressure, got denied. This left them without allies and allowed Russia to invade both without triggering mutual defense clauses. Burns got played. He has changed his mind since then and now argues for military aid for Ukraine, and warns about even wider war should Ukraine fall.
> Now France and others are claiming they must stop Russia, implicitly even if means World War 3, because the idea of Russia being able to set military and missiles within rapid striking range (on the territory of Ukraine) would be a tremendous threat to their national security. That is reasonable and true, and it is literally the exact same thing that Russia was saying when calling Ukraine in NATO a redline.
The threat is not "missiles within rapid striking range", because Russia already has nuclear missiles in Kaliningrad in the middle of the EU, closer to France than any point in Ukraine. The threat is Russia rolling over Ukraine and conscripting millions of Ukrainians into invading Poland, like they have conscripted Ukrainians from territories occupied in 2014 into fighting against Ukraine. It is better to stop Russians in Ukraine in already established battlefield than to see the war spread into the EU.
This is an interesting comment and its great to see a source.
I just want to add a bit to France's threats to deploy troops to Ukraine for direct conflict. There's a serious case to be made that this is France playing a game of chicken, essentially trying to get the Russians to have to consider that as a possibility and plan for the contingency, thus occupying their time and forcing them to hedge resources they would otherwise employ.
Certainly nobody knows for sure - unless they have penetrated French intelligence - but this seems to be the majority take of US foreign policy analysts I've read.
Whether such a game of chicken is responsible or not is its own discussion. Although one could also point to escalatory rhetoric from the other side.
>Whether such a game of chicken is responsible or not is its own discussion.
I'd argue giving in to nuclear blackmail is irresponsible. Personally I'd like to see the US version, with the Russians having to pause and think about what the eventual, complete loss of all their conventional forces in Ukraine looks like should they advance too far.
Then again, that's probably what the US has already communicated to them in private regarding use of tactical nukes.
This isn't what nukes would entail, for either side. If the US nukes Russian forces in Ukraine - Russia is going to retaliate with large scale nuclear strikes on the US. It's for this reason that if the US did want to go nuclear, it would likely be with a massive first-strike effort directly on Russia, which Russia would respond with in kind. The US has wargamed with tactical nukes a bunch - it always results in rapid escalation to 'the end.' I'm sure Russia has concluded the same. Neither side is ever going to threaten to go a 'little' nuclear.
I’m sorry, to clarify: The US version of the aforementioned game of chicken. That is, the threat of conventional military action.
It was widely reported that the US privately communicated the consequences of tactical nuclear weapon use to Russia, while maintaining an element of strategic ambiguity. Most reports suggested these consequences involved a full-scale conventional military response within Ukraine’s borders, thereby disincentivizing use.
In terms of subsequent escalation: As you pointed out, Russia of course knows using nukes against the US is literal suicide.
This scenario does not make any sense. Should the pandora's box of nuclear use be opened, it's not getting closed. And in this context, large scale conventional forces aren't much more than sitting ducks that would just be met with further nuclear strikes. It's for this reason that there's few, to no, scenarios involving nuclear weapons that don't result in global nuclear war, and thus the end of the developed world, if not of humanity.
The West wouldn't be replying in kind with tactical nukes, because that leads to escalation as you said. It's about proportional cost imposition as a means of deterrence.[0]
It's also possible the opening salvo of such a response might see tactical nuclear deployments neutralized via conventional means.
Absolutely, I completely understand the idea and motivation, but I'm arguing that it's impossible, and so unlikely to be our plan. The entire reason tactical nukes are desirable is because they obliterate conventional forces, and Russia has thousands of them. And keep in mind "tactical" often kind of masks what these are - these are not glorified bunker busters.
The bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to several times larger, would generally be considered "tactical" in modern times. These are massive weapons. Then there's ADM/'nuclear landmines' [1], and more. In the absolute worst case scenario, there's even the possibility of transitioning to strategic weapons. Approaching this sort of battlefield with conventional forces is not a viable idea.
So I have no idea what the US will do if Russia resorts to nuclear usage in Ukraine, but I think this scenario can logically be discarded as one of the possible options. It plays well in the media, but it simply does not make any strategic nor logical sense.
>Approaching this sort of battlefield with conventional forces is not a viable idea.
It's almost certainly unstated US foreign policy on the matter, and not just a media bluff.
They might have thousands but they don't have thousands deployed. Moreover, use with any kind of frequency would just trigger a strategic US response, which would defeat the entire purpose—assuming there was purpose in the first place, which there isn't given conventional cost imposition.
Despite chill messaging, I suspect the US's strategic trigger finger is far itchier when things get real, and Russia knows this. Their triad has two arms which very possibly are entirely negated, and their C&C infra is garbage. There's a very real risk they'd just straight up die and accomplish nothing.
You're conflating the two types of nukes here. Tactical nukes tend to be just physically much smaller than strategic. They can be used in artillery, normal missile systems, mines, etc. For instance one defector even claimed that the USSR had developed suitcase nukes that they were stashing in various locations in the US, which would be easier than ever now a days. [1] There is no concept of deployment for these - it's simple and normal usage. When you speak of deploying, you're talking about strategic nukes. These are the absolutely massive weapons (both in terms of payload and also in terms of literal size) that are generally launching out on ICBMs. Russia has around 1700 strategic nukes deployed, and thousands of tactical nukes of all shapes and sizes.
All that said I do agree that this would result in mutual mass strikes with strategic weapons, and whatever tactical weapons may be appropriate for such a strike. This is why I think direct conflict with Russia, or Russia using nuclear weapons of any sort in Ukraine, is likely to escalate rapidly to what would be the defacto end of the world.
Read the above link. There are currently a minimum of 1,710 known deployed Russian strategic nukes. But speaking of a deployed tactical nuke is somewhat nonsensical. It's like talking about a deployed 155mm shell. Firing them requires nothing particularly unique and knowing the exact amount available is impossible, other than that it's certainly in the thousands. That's again the primary difference between strategic and tactical.
My previous reply was talking entirely about tactical nukes. They're not exempt from the concept of deployment. Even the Russians don't just let them float around willy-nilly. Most sit in storage.
>But speaking of a deployed tactical nuke is somewhat nonsensical.
The people whose job it is to track deployments of tactical nuclear weapons would probably disagree.
Well nobody is entirely sure how many tactical nuclear weapons Russia has. Nobody is really sure of much really. Do you remember that early propaganda wave about needing to only give Ukraine $xx billion more because Russian was imminently running out of missiles? It was Stoltenberg that called it the 'critical phase' of the war, then repeated by all the media, late 2022 if I recall correctly. Everything on these topics is at best kind-of-sort-of-not-really intelligent guesses. We can't even get the vaguely right ballpark figure for their conventional warheads, and there's minimal effort to keep that classified relative to nuclear.
But strategic nukes are a different beast those simply because of their size and requirement for specialized launchers, as well as their relative incongruence with conventional weapons delivery devices. You're not launching a strategic nuke out of a conventional rocket system (as could be the case for a tactical nuke) for sure! So this makes them, more or less, able to be reasonably estimated. It's still a pretty big guessing game, but it's generally going to be at least roughly in the right ballpark.
You either support countries' right to self-determination or you don't. What happened in Ukraine and Georgia since 2008 is the equivalent of the United States repeatedly overthrowing democratically elected governments in Canada and Mexico, invading their provinces, then acting all surprised when citizens of those countries no longer want anything to do with the US and getting aggrieved about their "sphere of influence" and "buffer zone" shrinking. You can't maintain a "sphere of influence" if you antagonize all the countries in it.
You might notice that a lot of things happened in Russia internally since 2008 that indicate it's not a healthy society. While Putin is definitely the animus behind much of that and is fabulously, perhaps singularly evil, fundamentally the problem is people believing this "sphere of influence" crap instead of accepting countries' right to free association, territorial integrity and self-determination.
Please stop using the term "red line" when it comes to Vladimir Putin. There never was any red line his is a war of conquest, there are no defensive considerations it is an all or nothing personal survival gambit. He will try anything and everything if he thinks it will improve his chances of survival.
That's a long-winded way to say, "No fair! I only robbed your house because you threatened to join the neighborhood watch."
That aside, why would Russia need a 'buffer' from NATO? Russia is a nuclear power. They can never be attacked or conquered again... except from within.
If Ukraine will win war with Russia, it will mean that Ukraine will take their place as mightiest country in the world. EU will be a good buffer for us.
Huh? Did Afghanistan take Soviet Union's place as the mightiest country in the world, when they pulled out? Did Afghanistan or Vietnam take the US's place as the mightiest country in the world, when they pulled out?
