I've long referred to the events in Ukraine as Ragnarok--the bloody end-of-days battle in Nordic mythology that was to have begun on February 22, 2014. So what happened on that fateful day? That was the day that the U.S. backed opposition party in Ukraine took power from the Russian backed president Viktor Yanukovych and started the whole mess which led to current Russo-Ukrainian war. So, in the back of my mind, I always believed that there was a high probability that this conflict could spark a global war.
And, as I noted in this 2015 piece, Richard Fernandez and Michael Lundeen had postulated that we were already, at that point in time, engaged in a global conflict with Russia and China. Vox Day recently observed the same thing, writing:
Don’t forget that WWII started with the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931, seven years before the Austrian Anschluss and ten years before the USA got openly involved. Even though we didn’t realize it until 2022, WWIII began in 2014 with the Maiden Coup in Ukraine, and it won’t be surprising if, ten years later, the US military gets openly involved in 2024.
He has also suggested that if open conflict breaks out, it will come to the U.S.--not just in the form of cyberattacks, but also in the form of military personnel that have infiltrated our country due to our lax border security.
We are now another step closer to direct conflict with Russia: the Daily Mail reports that "Ukraine is set to receive longer-range US missiles armed with cluster bombs, granting Kyiv the ability to cause significant damage deep within Russian-held territory." From that article:
The US could soon send longer-range missiles packed with cluster bombs to Ukraine, giving Kyiv the ability to cause significant damage deeper within Russian-occupied territory, officials have said.
The Biden administration is close to approving the shipment, according to the officials, after seeing the success of cluster munitions delivered in 155 mm artillery rounds in recent months.
Washington is now considering shipping either or both Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS) that can fly up to 190 miles (306 km), or Guided Multiple Launch Rocket System (GMLRS) missiles with a 45-mile range packed with cluster bombs, three officials said.
'Now is the time,' one said as Ukraine's forces are hoping for a major breakthrough in their counteroffensive, which they suggest the weapons could help provide.
Last week Ukraine's Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said he and Secretary of State Antony Blinken had discussed the US providing the long-range missiles and that he hoped for a positive decision.
If approved, either option would be available for rapid shipment to Kyiv. Ukraine is currently equipped with 155mm artillery with a maximum range of 18 miles carrying up to 48 bomblets.
The ATACMS under consideration would propel around 300 or more bomblets. The GMLRS rocket system, a version of which Ukraine has had in its arsenal for months, would be able to disperse up to 404 cluster munitions.
If Biden signs off on the transfer, he will provide a weapon for which Ukraine has clamored since the earliest days of the 18-month war. ATACMS, which can travel up to 190 miles, would give Ukraine’s forces the ability to strike far beyond Russia’s defensive positions inside Ukraine and, possibly, deep into Russian sovereign territory.
Ukraine already has received some long-range missiles, such as the U.K.-donated Storm Shadow that can travel over 150 miles. The Storm Shadow is launched from Ukrainian Soviet-era jets, while the ATACMS can be fired from the High Mobility Artillery Rocket System already in Ukraine, which would allow the Ukrainians much more flexibility in where and how they launch the missile.
Those launchers normally fire rockets that travel about 50 miles, though the U.S. has also promised to send the ground-launched small diameter bomb by the end of the year, which can hit targets over 90 miles away.
As its ground forces launch attacks against well-defended Russian trench lines and heavily fortified positions, Ukraine has prioritized hitting Russian logistics nodes and transportation hubs well behind the front lines. The Storm Shadow missiles have also targeted ammunition dumps in Crimea.
As you may remember, Russia has warned in the past that the provision of long range weapons to Ukraine would cross a "red-line". Reuters reported a year ago--September 15, 2022--that "Russia's Foreign Ministry said on Thursday that if the United States decided to supply Kyiv with longer-range missiles, it would cross a 'red line' and become 'a party to the conflict'."
And in late May of this year, Daniel Block wrote in The Atlantic that providing longer range missiles to Ukraine would be a red line that the Biden Administration would not cross. He explained:
And yet there’s one line Washington hasn’t crossed. Despite repeated pleas, the United States has not given Kyiv land-based missiles capable of hitting Russia.
“We’re not going to send to Ukraine rocket systems that strike into Russia,” U.S. President Joe Biden told reporters in September. He hasn’t budged since.
To many analysts, Biden’s decision—and implicit reasoning—is perceptive. Sustained Ukrainian attacks inside Russia’s territory could violate Putin’s red lines in a way that previous strikes haven’t. So could repeatedly hitting Crimea, the peninsula that the Kremlin illegally annexed from Ukraine in 2014. “It’s Crimea and Russian territory,” Austin Carson, a political-science professor at the University of Chicago who studies escalation, told me. “I would worry about crossing one of those bedrock limits.”
So what's changed? Well, for one, as Block points out in his piece, Ukraine obtained similar weapons from other sources and Russia didn't escalate:
... Kyiv has made isolated attacks on Crimea and Russia before, none of which has widened the conflict. In fact, none of Moscow’s wartime escalations has touched NATO land. And the United Kingdom has already given Kyiv some missiles, fired from planes, that can reach into Russia. France may do so as well. Britain’s provision did not prompt the Kremlin to go berserk.
The Politico article cited earlier similarly states:
The administration has long been skeptical of providing ATACMS to Ukraine. Last year, national security adviser Jake Sullivan told an Aspen Security Forum audience that Biden wanted “to ensure that we don’t get into a situation in which we are approaching the Third World War.” Sending missiles that Ukraine could launch into Russia would increase that risk, he said.
But in July, Sullivan told the same conference that the administration was “prepared to take risks, and we will continue to be prepared to take risks to provide support to Ukraine.” The strong statement came after the United Kingdom and France both sent long-range weapons of their own to Ukraine, leading to criticism of the U.S. for not following suit.
This has come up before in the war. In an excellent article at Responsible Statecraft, "Russian hawks push Putin to escalate as US crosses more ‘red lines’," it outlines past decisions to not supply Ukraine with weapons for fear of pushing Russia too far, which decisions were later abandoned due to Russia not escalating against the West and Ukraine's need for the weapon systems: weapons such as the HIMARS (since provided to Ukraine), the M1 Abrams tanks and F-16s (which have been promised, although I'm not aware of actual delivery).
Another issue is that Ukraine may need those weapons in order to continue to make headway. Returning to Block's article, which was written in May when the results of Ukraine's planned summer offensive was still unknown, Block noted:
... Kyiv may need long-range U.S. missiles to win the conflict. “It’s just impossible to be on the battlefield and continuing to fight with the weapons that Ukraine already has,” Polina Beliakova, a Ukrainian political scientist at Dartmouth College who studies civil-military relations, told me. Ukrainian soldiers, she said, are performing admirably. But without superior weapons, even the most motivated military will struggle to defeat a much larger enemy. To liberate more provinces, Ukrainians could have to strike hard, far, and again and again. Washington will have to decide just how much it is prepared to help them.
Block also relates:
[Ukrainian Defense Minister Andriy] Zagorodnyuk said that, if received, ATACMS could give Ukraine major advantages. For starters, the missiles would make it much easier for Kyiv to hit most of Russia’s command posts and wartime weapons depots, which typically lie beyond the front lines but within 186 miles. ATACMS would also help the Ukrainian military sever the so-called land bridge to Crimea: the thin strip of occupied territory that connects Russia with the peninsula’s isthmus. Similarly, the missiles could hit the bridge that directly links Crimea with Russia. Together, these attacks would substantially weaken Moscow’s forces in southern Ukraine, helping with Kyiv’s counteroffensive. They could even pave the way for Ukraine to take back the peninsula, which is widely considered Kyiv’s hardest military target.
As we now know, the summer offensive has largely been a failure. But, as the Daily Mail article indicates, "With Ukraine's push against Russian forces showing signs of progress, the administration is keen to boost the Ukrainian military at a vital moment, two of the sources said." In other words, there is hope that providing the missiles could turn the tide of the war.
A third reason is that the Army's prior reluctance to providing ATACMS due to shortfalls in its own stockpiles may be fading because the Army is set to start receiving the ATACMS's replacement. The Politico story relates:
The Pentagon, meanwhile, has been hesitant to send ATACMS because of concerns over how many missiles the U.S. has in its inventory. DOD officials previously told their Ukrainian counterparts that the U.S. didn’t have any ATACMS in its stockpile to spare. The weapons’ manufacturer, Lockheed Martin, currently makes about 500 ATACMS a year, though they’re all slated for sale to Poland, Finland, Romania, the UAE and Taiwan, which have ordered the missile system in recent years.
The Army hasn’t purchased new ATACMS in several years, though it has upgraded them with better guidance systems. The service is also preparing to move past the ATACMS, and beginning this year will start the transition to the new Precision Strike Missile, which can travel at least 310 miles, vastly outranging the ATACMS’ 190 miles.
The Army will start receiving deliveries of the new missile this year, which could make more ATACMS available to transfer to other countries.
But this brings me back to the question I asked in March 2022: could this go nuclear. The author the Responsible Statecraft article thinks "yes":
Much of this debate [on providing ATACMS] centers on one key question: Should the U.S. encourage Ukrainian attacks within Russia? Blinken’s recent comments suggest that the Biden administration has shifted its position on this question from a hard “no” to a tacit “yes”.
As Russian hawks continue to call for escalation, Putin is left with a dwindling set of options for signaling his displeasure with American policy on the war. Among other things, he could shoot down a Western plane flying near Russian airspace, or perhaps set up a covert attack against a NATO base, as he did with a Czech arms depot in 2014. As Beebe of the Quincy Institute has noted, Putin could also attack American satellites in order to hurt Western logistical support for Ukrainian operations.
But a more ominous threat looms on the horizon. If Ukraine starts to rack up more military successes with advanced Western weapons, some analysts worry that Putin could reach for the ultimate weapon.
“If the Russian military is not able to escalate or to prevent Ukraine from [retaking its territory], Putin will have no other way of escalating the war militarily than through a nuclear weapon,” retired Gen. Kevin Ryan told RS earlier this year.
And back to Block's article in The Atlantic:
The odds of Russia attacking NATO, digitally or otherwise, might seem long. But they are not outlandish, especially considering Moscow’s perspective. “Russia doesn’t see itself fighting Ukraine,” Margarita Konaev, the deputy director of analysis at Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology, told me. “It sees itself fighting NATO.”
The Kremlin’s reasoning, she explained, makes some sense. Moscow is battling against NATO weapons systems. Its troops are being hit with NATO members’ ammunition. Ukraine is operating based off U.S. intelligence. “The only thing they’re not fighting are NATO troops on the ground,” Konaev said. If Ukraine begins regularly shelling Crimea or Russian territory with U.S.-made weapons, Russia could respond as if NATO were attacking the homeland.
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Prior Posts:- Ragnarok
- Ragnarok--Part II
- Ragnarok--Part III: What Are Russia's Intentions?
- Ragnarok Part IV--What Response?
- Ragnarok Part V--Ripples and Consequences
- Ragnarok Part VI--Taking East Ukraine
- Ragnarok Part VII -- Russian Occupation of the Donbas
- Ragnarok Part VIII -- Russia Invades Ukraine
- Ragnarok Part IX -- Could This Go Nuclear?
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