By mobilizing 40 countries and handing over a $ 33 billion budget to Ukraine, Washington has chosen to ignore Vladimir Putin’s threats to use nuclear weapons and confront Moscow in a more or less covert manner, apparently without fear of pushing the Russian president to his limit.
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The day after a meeting organized by Washington in Rammstein, Germany to organize the support of about forty countries for Ukraine, Mr. Putin on Wednesday promised a “quick and lightning” response to any outside intervention in the controversy.
The Russian president referred to “those tools that no one else can boast of now,” which is a thin covert reference to a tactical nuclear weapon that provides Russian military theory to force an enemy to retreat.
Instead of backing down, Joe Biden asked Congress the next day for a massive budget extension of $ 33 billion, of which 20 billion would go to arms supplies, albeit almost seven times the impressive amount. Weapons and ammunition have already been delivered to Ukraine since the Russian invasion began on February 24.
The U.S. administration now supplies heavy weapons such as artillery, helicopters and drones to Kiev. He hesitated for a long time for fear that the conflict would spread to other NATO countries.
That concern seems to have faded in Washington, and on Monday Defense Minister Lloyd Austin set his sights on “seeing Russia so weak that it could not do things like invade Ukraine.” To Kiev.
Within the US government, the nuclear threat from Russia has now been pushed aside.
Joe Biden thus condemned Vladimir Putin’s “irresponsible” threats on Thursday, and ruled that they “faced a sense of frustration felt by Russia and its awful defeat in relation to its initial intentions”.
On Friday, a senior Pentagon official told Washington that he “does not believe there is a risk of using nuclear weapons or that there is a threat to NATO territory.”
According to Lawrence Friedman, an Emeritus professor at King’s College London, various threats from Russia are “being taken for granted”. “It’s already a declining force,” he adds to his blog.
Results shared by Gideon Rose of the Foreign Relations Council in New York. “Moscow will not use nuclear weapons during Moscow,” he told the Foreign Affairs Magazine.
Vladimir Putin “knows that extraordinary retaliation and global objections will be pursued, and no strategic advantage can justify them, not to mention the possible radioactive effects on Russia,” he added.
“The United States has not attacked Russia,” he said. According to Biden, Washington has accelerated military equipment to Ukraine and is now openly training US troops on Ukrainian heavy weapons.
Thus, this conflict takes all forms of a “proxy war” against Moscow through a Ukrainian mediator, as Sam Winter-Levy of Princeton University mentions in a special blog, War on the Rocks.
This kind of proxy war between Saudi Arabia and Iran by the Houthi rebels in Yemen poses an “increasingly dangerous outcome” because of the increased risk, and this expert estimates that such a war will generally last a long time. Collaborator with West Point American Military Academy.
But “it may be the best option,” he adds, “because the West has no choice.” “In the end, a cheap Russian victory in Ukraine or a direct confrontation between the US and Russia are the only options worse than a proxy war.”
