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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.
If NATO directly entered the war with large numbers of its own combat forces, it would defeat Russia's military and drive it out of Ukraine. Russia's only way of stopping NATO from doing that is to make NATO think that if driven far enough into a corner, Russia might actually escalate to using nuclear weapons. This works because, some extreme hawks aside, the vast majority of people who are well informed about the risks probably do not think that ensuring the Kiev government's ability to control Ukraine would be worth, say, a 10% increase in the chance of total nuclear war that would lead to the destruction of every major NATO and Russian city. On the other hand, they might think that it would be worth a 1% increase in that chance. Of course I am making up these specific percentages, but my point is that there is some threshold of the risk of nuclear war above which NATO does not think that helping Kiev with direct military intervention is worth that risk. The Russian government's task is to do whatever it can to make that threshold as low as possible. Hence Russia benefits from behaving in its rhetoric like an increasingly angry man being driven into a corner. Allowing NATO to think that the chance of nuclear war is zero would with very high probability lead to Russian defeat, since Russia is not strong enough to militarily defeat a direct large-scale NATO intervention. On the other hand, Russia of course does not actually want nuclear war any more than NATO does. Russia's proper strategy is thus to act like NATO is driving it closer and closer to the nuclear button with every NATO escalation.
Presumably and I hope, the people who actually make NATO's decisions have studied history and realize that just because NATO has broken multiple Russian red lines without major retaliation, it does not mean that every red line is meaningless. An example from history would be Germany breaking England and France's red lines before World War 2. Germany remilitarized the Ruhr, expanded the size of the Wehrmacht in violation of treaty agreements, united with Austria, and occupied Czechoslovakia all without provoking a large-scale war, but when it invaded Poland then England and France declared war - that had been a red line too far.
Don't even have to go that far back in history to find an example. Russia said in 2008 that Ukraine joining NATO was a red line. They invaded in 2022 after the west started pumping the country full of weapons and refused to back off its NATO talks. Now half a million Ukrainians are dead and 6 million fled, it's industry and economy are in ruins and it's demographics with those 6 million being mostly women means it's pretty much done as an independent state even if the war ends tomorrow.
Russia clearly has red lines. I don't know why the imperialist faction of western political groups is so intent on finding out where its nuclear one is.
Is that a rhetorical question? It is very useful for an imperialist faction to know where the nuclear line of their enemy actually is, rather than where they say it is.
It is also very useful for a nonimperialist faction to know where the nuclear line of their enemy is.
In fact, it's particularly useful to know if/when the enemy is imperialist towards them.
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