Let’s cut to the chase: are we witnessing the prelude to World War 3?
Let’s face it, this is what many people are asking and thinking in light of the Kremlin’s recent actions against Ukraine, which have triggered a barrage of denunciations and sanctions from the West.
The answer is no. As bad as the situation on the border between Russia and Ukraine is at the moment, one cannot imagine a direct military confrontation between the NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) military alliance and Russia.
Incidentally, as the US and UK watched Russia assemble a force capable of invading Ukraine, they quickly withdrew their small number of military advisers.
“It’s a world war when Americans and Russians start shooting at each other,” US President Joe Biden said earlier this month, vowing he would not send US troops to Ukraine under any circumstances.
But Western leaders still fear that Russia could be ready to carry out a full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
How concerned you should be still depends on a number of factors — who you are, where you are and what Russia will do next.
If you are a Ukrainian soldier on the front line in eastern Ukraine, clearly the situation is extremely dangerous. And for millions of Ukrainians, the fear of how the crisis will affect their daily lives is ever-present.
Only President Putin and his inner circle of trust know how far he intends to take this crisis. As long as Russia’s strength remains concentrated on the borders, even the bustling Ukrainian capital Kiev and other cities will not be safe from attack.
But the red line for NATO and the West is if Russia threatens any member state of the group. Under Article 5 of NATO, the Western military alliance is obligated to defend any member state that is attacked.
Ukraine is not a member of NATO, although it has said it wants to join the military alliance — something Putin is determined to stop. Eastern European countries such as Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania or Poland — which were once part of Moscow’s orbit in Soviet times — are all members of NATO.
These governments are clearly nervous that Russian forces might not stop in Ukraine and use some pretext of “helping” Russian ethnic minorities in the Baltic to continue invading other countries. For this reason, NATO recently sent reinforcements to its Eastern European members.
But how worried should you be? As long as there is no direct conflict between Russia and NATO, there is no reason for this crisis, no matter how bad, to turn into a full-scale world war.
Let’s not forget that Russia and the US have more than 8,000 nuclear warheads between them, so the stakes are stratospherically high. The old Cold War maxim of “mutually assured destruction” (MAD) still applies.
“Putin is not about to attack NATO. He just wants to turn Ukraine into a vassal state like Belarus,” a top British military source said on Tuesday.
But what is unpredictable here is Putin’s state of mind. Often described as coldly calculating, like the chess player and judo fighter he is, his speech on Monday (21) sounded more like that of an angry dictator than that of a cunning strategist.
Calling NATO “perverse,” he said in no uncertain terms that Ukraine had no right to exist as a sovereign nation independent of Russia. This is worrying.
The UK is not the only country punishing Russia with sanctions — the US has gone further and Germany, for example, has delayed approval of Russia’s massive Nord Stream 2 pipeline. But the UK was a pioneer in sanctions.
Russia will certainly retaliate in some way. Western companies in Russia are likely to suffer. But everything could get much worse, if Putin wants to.
Revenge could come in the form of cyber attacks — something the UK’s National Cyber ​​Security Center has already warned about. Often difficult to attribute to the Russian government, these attacks can target banks, companies, individuals and even critical national infrastructure.
The problem now is that, after years of declining relations with Moscow, including the poisoning of Russian dissidents on British soil, mutual trust between Russia and the West is close to zero. And this is a dangerous scenario amid the ongoing crisis in Ukraine.
