While Ukrainian military officials insisted they needed permission to strike inside Russia to counter coming Russian attacks in the Kharkov region, it has since used Western weapons to attack targets irrelevant to the special military operation.
Over the past week, Ukraine claimed that it struck two Russian early warning radar systems designed to detect long-range ballistic missile attacks, including nuclear strikes. Neither system that was targeted was turned toward Ukrainian territory, which seems to implicate an alternative motive than affecting the Ukrainian theater.
The attack represented a significant escalation of the conflict and came as NATO countries toyed with the idea of sending their troops to Ukraine to fill Kiev’s manpower shortage.
“The fact that Russia is winning on the battlefield in Ukraine only makes them more desperate to strike through that sock puppet harder,” explained international relations and security expert Mark Sleboda on Sputnik’s Fault Lines on Wednesday.
Since Russia has proven more than capable of defeating NATO equipment and tactics on the battlefield, it has little reason to fear a conventional land war against NATO countries in Ukraine, but that could easily spiral into a nuclear war which forces any rational actor to behave with caution.
“NATO representatives, especially in Europe, should be aware of what they are playing with,” Putin said at a press conference in Uzbekistan on Tuesday.
Western countries don’t fear allowing Kiev to strike inside of Russia because they already have and those countries didn’t suffer any significant consequences, noted Sleboda.
“They don't believe that Russia will strike back except against Ukraine, which they don't really care about,” he said.
On Wednesday, the Head of the Delegation of the Russian Federation to the Vienna Negotiations on Military Security and Arms Control, Konstantin Gavrilov warned that “A potential aggressor needs to realize that, if attacked, we reserve the right to act ‘as the situation demands,’ so to speak, and use all our capabilities,” adding that any response to violating Russian redlines “may be truly devastating.”
With its numerous successes on the battlefield over the past several months Russia has no reason to seek escalation, but Western countries continue to try to provoke Russia into a wider war despite the consequences it could hold for all of civilization.
“[Russia is] winning at an ever faster and less deniable rate right now, so they’re trying very hard not to respond to NATO escalations and provocations,” explained Sleboda. “But because [of] the desperation that the West is feeling and [since] nothing they’re doing is changing a thing on the battlefield, their escalation and provocations keep getting bigger and harder to ignore.”
A recent study by Nature estimated that a nuclear war between the United States and Russia would result in around 5 billion deaths worldwide.