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Everyone tired of RU/UA war? Well, Biden okayed long-range missile strikes against Russian territory as most of you know. Russia's response? After Putin threatening nuclear war in the event of this happening for months, Lavrov (the FM) came out today by going out of his way saying Russia doesn't want nuclear war.
What can we learn from this?
Don't set ridiculous red lines that are easily broken.
Don't threaten a massive response if you were never serious. You will lose face.
What's bizarre to me is that Russia is clearly winning the war, so this type of rhetorical hysteria was an unforced error by Putin. It should also be noted that the recent decision by Biden is a naked attempt to bind the hands of Trump, in order to make it harder to de-escalate once he enters the WH.
This also creates a bizarre internal dynamic within Russia as I'm already seeing Russians on social media saying that Putin is once again displaying weakness. This is of course nonsense (Putin's threats could never be realised), but it nevertheless allows for a narrative to set in that will make any negotiation harder for the Russian side as a popular understanding of Putin as a softie will slowly calcify. Any concession will be ferociously contested as proof of Putin once again going soft.
Can anyone steel man Biden's actions here?
The war is coming to a close. Trump's win gives him the political capital to go to the negotiating table and bring this ugly chapter of European history to a close. It will probably result in Russia gaining some of the Russian speaking territories of Ukraine. There's not much we can do about that unless we want to spend a few hundred thousand more lives.
Ideally, Biden would make peace now. It's his last chance to do something good for the world. A Nobel Peace Prize would put a positive sheen on an otherwise terrible Presidency. Failing that, the focus should be on strengthening the Ukrainian front lines. Lines of control tend to ossify into political boundaries.
This pointless escalation does nothing to help Ukraine achieve victory. You're right that Russia is not about to start nuking cities. But there are lots of things that they can do to be annoying, such as restricting exports of key materials, cutting underseas cables, or even blowing up GPS satellites.
Is Biden hoping to bait Putin into an escalation that Trump can't ignore, thereby preventing him from ending the war. If so, this seems evil, there's no other way to put it. The Biden admin and the Cheneys deserve each other.
There is still no deal that Putin would offer that Zelensky and the Ukrainian people would accept, and Trump's claim that he could end the war in 24 hours is laughable and delusional. Until at least one of Putin or Zelensky are utterly desperate, no peace will be possible. Ukraine is definitely hurting right now, but it's still sitting on more territory than it was in August 2022, and none of Russia's attacks have come close to the scale of territorial gains of the Kharkiv counteroffensive.
Now, would Zelensky's calculus change if the US threatened to cut off aid? Yes, but this would massively alienate Biden from Democratic leadership and American allies in Europe. It's a different story for Trump, of course; not only is there support for these tactics among many in his leadership team, but even European leaders recognise that this is a policy he campaigned on, so he has a democratic mandate to push for it. By contrast, it would seem to many in Europe and in the Democratic party to be a gross betrayal if Biden were to threaten to withhold aid.
That said, I think even Trump will have a harder time of it than he expects. Any pressure applied to Ukraine will also change Putin's calculus, insofar as it will incentivise him to exploit Ukraine's new weakness to push the lines of battle further in Russia's favour. Creating enough desperation on the Ukrainian side without creating corresponding greed on the Russian side will be a very hard needle to thread.
There's also the European factor. If Trump pushes Zelensky too hard (as perceived by Europe), there's a real possibility of a hard transatlantic split emerging. While Europe would struggle to fill the void left by the US if all aid was blocked, it would be interesting to see how far they could "step up", especially if they supplemented their military production with purchases made on Ukraine's behalf from suppliers like South Korea, Turkey, and Pakistan. And while the US has been supplying the lion's share of lethal aid, Europe is sitting on a gold mine in the form of Russia's $180 billion in foreign exchange reserves held at Euroclear in Belgium. Additionally, the US in some cases has been using its diplomatic efforts to restrain transfer of weapons from European countries, most notably Sweden's Gripen with its long-ranged Meteor missiles, which would be far more useful to Ukraine than F-16s and AIM-120s.
That said, I think this scenario is quite unlikely, because it would be the biggest breakdown in Transatlantic relations since at least the Suez Crisis. It would be a huge fillip to European defense contractors like Rheinmetall and Thales - and a corresponding disaster for Lockheed, Northrop, General Dynamics, etc. - insofar as it would make it politically and strategically very difficult for Europe to buy American arms and equipment for decades to come. It would strongly increase the probability of European neutrality in any conflict in the Pacific, and could tempt Europe to closer economic relationships with China, as well as leading to a wider cooling-off of co-operation in the Middle East and beyond. The French in particular would be ecstatic at all of this. Consequently, I think it's unlikely that even a Trump White House would push Ukraine so hard as to prompt a split in American-European policy. But hell, Bolton seems to think Trump will pull out of NATO, so anything is possible. It would sure as hell be interesting times if they did.
A week or so ago, I posted a comment that appears to have been mostly ignored. In it, I referred to the work of William Spaniel, a political scientist of game theory and international conflict, who was in turn referring to a Trumpist think tank plan to end the war. Short short story is that it's basically a two-sided threat to make both Putin/Zelensky, well, not necessarily "utterly desperate", because from his academic view, you don't need utter desperation to make peace. Instead, simply shift their estimates of the costs/benefits enough to overcome whatever bargaining friction is still getting in the way. (One needs some Lines On Maps lore from his channel to understand that the major view of his discipline is that wars don't just happen because of substantive disagreements; you need both a substantive disagreement and a bargaining friction.)
Maybe to go into slightly more detail, the proposed plan is not to try to simply manage Russian greed in some way. Instead, it's to just straight threaten them, too. If they don't agree to basically whatever Trump has decreed, he will flood Ukraine with unthinkable quantities of top-tier weapons (and remove many of those silly restrictions on them). That would shift Putin's calculus to being almost entirely about whether he actually can really escalate against a full-fledged and unleashed American proxy without being even more directly escalated on. Because if not, that's a pretty significant threat that opens up a wide range of plausible bargains.
I didn't go into full detail in my other comment, but he thinks that the spectre of Trump (and possibly this Trumpist plan) could have been part of the impetus for both Ukraine's Kursk offensive and also Russia's recent ramping up in the east. If they think that Trump could get elected, roll in, threaten the crap out of both of them, and just up and declare that he thinks the solution should be X (plausibly with it corresponding to the current state of the war, with some horsetrading), and if at that point they'd have nothing better to do than accept, then they're both incentivized to rapidly ramp up as much as they can and make as many gains as they can now, before Trump draws his line, probably even if it's unsustainable.
That threat to Putin is oversold though.
First, it's not immediately clear extra military aid will be a decisive war-ending move, an extra thousand armored vehicles or guided missiles will help, sure, Ukraine will certainly welcome it, but currently the greatest challenge for the Ukrainian military is a manpower shortage, that the extra metal does not solve. Even with "lend-lease on steroids," I don't believe it to be likely that Ukraine will be able to push the Russians back to the 2022 borders, maybe it'll just be enough to stabilize the front lines.
Second, Trump has an electoral mandate to reduce aid to Ukraine, not increase it. That's what he ran on. Putin knows this. This makes Trump's threat of increasing Ukraine aid a lot less credible. He knows that if Trump follows through with this threat, the American electorate will become displeased that the aid dollars doubled and yet the war still has no end in sight.
Yeah, besides a lot more Abrams and Bradleys and F-16s (which definitely aren't nothing, but aren't superweapons either) it's not really clear to me what the US has left to give at this point. We won't give them F-35s. We probably won't give them the other really wacky silver bullets we have.
He also put Rubio in SecState. Rubio voted against Biden's Ukraine aid bill in April. So I think that signals where he's gonna go, although I don't consider Rubio a Russia dove or something.
I do think I kinda agree with @Dean above, though, that in a sense it's a gift to Trump. Gives him maximal leverage and, as Dean points out, since it's a lame duck call it's less likely that Putin will escalate (at least in the short term, until he susses out Trump's negotiation posture).
More missile AA. Ukraine is generally good at counterbattery fire, but needs something to counter Russian precision-guided bombs. One Patriot per 50km of frontline will change a lot.
I suspect we're in a bad way on Patriot ammo, which matters a lot if we go up against China. We might be able to get the ones Israel recently retired.
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