Things keep ratcheting up in Ukraine, with France continuing its saber-rattling escalatory spiral. Let’s quickly run down the new separate signals being sent from all across NATO: In a new Le Parisien piece, Macron reportedly reiterated the eventual need for ground troops to save Ukraine:
Russia must not back down, they must not be blackmailed.
Euros had their chance for decades. They asked nicely, invite us to NATO or stop expanding. They gave warnings about Ukraine, they signed treaties to try and avoid conflict that turned out to be dishonest lies from the start, they gave final warnings and despite decades of being lied to, gas-lighted and stabbed in the back with false promises even as the fighting began they offered one last chance, a good deal that would see Ukraine continue to exist minus Crimea that was shot down.
The west is simply not interested in good faith and if they back down here, now they will forever regret it. Better to send out one vicious blow now against the western troops and destroy them, make them think twice than back down and have the conflict back and pushing inside Russia in a few years when they’ve re-armed.
We can all have our opinions about what Russia should do, but bear in mind you learn more from looking at what is happening and thinking about what could happen than by deciding what ought to happen when you have no way to influence the outcome.
You may think that Russia should be more aggressive but you don’t have available to you the full picture that Russia sees. There is more to this conflict than just the military side, there is a larger diplomatic, geopolitical and economic game being played.
In the end their decision may surprise you, just as it is meant to surprise their enemies, to keep them guessing and unbalanced.
By the way, i thought this was a very good comment from someone on Twitter on the topic of Russia responding to western provocations and escalations:
"“Why don’t the Russians do [x] in response to [y] provocation?”
Because they’re serious people and not in the mood to be led around by their enemies.
“Reflexive control” is the control that you exert over an adversary’s actions when they feel compelled to retaliate against you. The Iranians are quite good at it, they recently managed to get the US Navy to literally steam out of the Persian Gulf and Mediterranean and get into an ever-deepening engagement in the Red Sea - far from Iran, Syria, and Lebanon - by suggesting the Houthis start taking potshots at passing merchant ships. If every military action you take gets a symmetrical reaction then you can control the nature, venue, and tempo of conflict to your benefit.
Any observer of the Ukrainian War can tell you that the Russians rarely if ever launch operations that are directly retaliatory despite provocations - some of them as flagrant as obvious cross-border attacks from NATO countries - that are too numerous to list. If they did, WWIII would have started in 2022. Instead, the Russians have largely ignored these provocations, absorbed whatever minor damage has been inflicted, and carried on with their actual objectives. And because of that, who is in the driver’s seat of the war right now?
Russia."
Minus the part about Iran telling the “Houthis” (Ansarallah) what to do, which i am skeptical is actually the case, this pretty much nails it why you don’t want to be drawn into the trap of waging a reactive war.
I don’t think the Iranians order the Ansarallah around, but they sure are happy to give them missiles to destroy western shipping.
Seeing from this perspective and what OP posted below I could see Russia trying to make Ukraine as the only battlefield and allowing the west to send in their troops, their F-35s, their whatever else they have and just aim for atrition against the west until their forces are no match for Russia while at the same time working with China to take all the countries in the Global South away from the west. The problem is that this could take too long and allow the west to reindustrialize enugh to be a problem.
So while I can see at least one possible strategy in this scenario where Russia doesn’t escalate I’m still not sure it would be their best path forward.
I am not sure that the West can reindustrialize. They are structurally and ideologically wedded to the neoliberal financialized economic model that has hollowed out their industrial base and there is no economic impetus to change that. They are and remain slaves to the profit motive, and even as that is proving to be their downfall they keep doubling down.
I do agree to some extent, but if the west sees their profits fall because they lose too much of the countries that they have selling them cheap goods/resources, as one of many possible examples, even they are capable of realizing that reindustrialization might be a necessity and that’s more of what I was thinking about. If this takes 2 decades and Russia can win in 1 then it might not a problem, but if the west industrializes fast that is a problem for Russia.
No country should underestimate their enemies after all.
Indeed. Yet that is exactly what the collective West is and has been doing for decades, and its current leadership class seem psychologically incapable of doing otherwise.