The sinking of the Russian cruiser Moskva and the increasing influx of heavy weapons from NATO countries into Ukraine, both factors that so far are not decisive for the course of the war initiated by Russia, test the limits of Vladimir Putin’s warmongering rhetoric.
Over the nearly two-month war, Putin has sought to paint the conflict as a clash against the West, which was already one of the “casus belli” of the invasion, to prevent Kiev from joining the military alliance.
But it’s something that comes from afar and is embedded in the thinking of the Russian elite: the notion that NATO’s expansion to the east was aimed at undermining the Kremlin in the post-Cold War period. Added to this is the West’s explicit support for anti-Russian movements in Ukraine since the days of the somewhat farcical Orange Revolution of 2004.
The rest is derivation: the February 24 invasion brought the predictable tsunami of Western sanctions against the Kremlin, and Putin’s popularity as a Slavic crusader soared at this first moment, despite the evident panic gripping the Russian educated middle class. .
For his part, the president for now seeks to keep himself afloat economically with the help of the part of the world that has not adhered to the punishment program, China and India at the forefront. And he has intensified his speech against the West, painting the war more and more as a bigger struggle, aiming for Washington at the end.
Thus, on the 1st of the conflict, he threatened to use nuclear weapons against anyone who intervened and took up the topic again when Finland and Sweden placed themselves in the NATO enlistment line.
Russian officials say every other day that convoys with weapons of Western origin will be attacked. It’s rhetorical for now, but that could be changing. First, the Moskva (Moscow, in Russian, to add insult to injury), which did not rise above the waterline. At this point, it is irrelevant whether it was hit by missiles, a hard defeat and only the second for a ship of its size since World War II, or whether the weapons magazine exploded, which implies something even worse — sloppiness.
What really matters are the reactions. For Moscow to admit the vexatious version of the accident, it is quite likely that it was an attack. Already the US says yes, they were missiles, but of Ukrainian manufacture. To the American CNN on Sunday (17) Volodymyr Zelensky, the theatrical president in Kiev, put on a sly face and deflected the conversation, just celebrating the loss of Russian firepower.
What does all this say? That no one wants to risk an obvious escalation. It’s one thing for a T-72 tank to be destroyed by an American Javelin gun, or even a Mi-28 attack helicopter to be shot down by a British Starstreak portable anti-aircraft missile launcher.
If it became clear that the Moskva was sunk by one or two American Harpoon missiles, which the UK said it would supply Kiev, the situation would be different. The Russian Navy, which has basically been a launcher of Kalibr cruise missiles from small ships of the Black Sea Fleet and functioned to coordinate the airspace in the region, one of the main tasks of the Moskva by the way, in this war. The loss of the great ship, obsolete in many ways, is already hard on Russian naval pride.
But the smokescreen on all sides shows that no one wants, for all the hype, to escalate the war into something that makes Putin think about using the proverbial red button on the atomic bomb. Meanwhile, the Poles pushed an uncertain number of T-72 tanks from their stocks across the border, just as the Slovaks had done before with anti-aircraft and armored systems.
Putin’s promised attacks on these shipments, or on the more difficult to track convoys with Javelin, Starstreak and other handheld devices, have taken place. There was a missile bombardment of a base receiving Western instructors and distributing these weapons, but it was more of a warning than a pattern.
The point is that the Westerners are gradually increasing their bet on Ukraine’s arms. So far, neither the loss of Moskva nor the Polish tanks will change the upcoming battle for Donbass, but no one knows what might happen next.
On the surface, the turmoil continues: on Russian state TV, questions about what happened to Moskva are confused with presenters talking about a Third War already underway, while in the West experts take turns about the risk of the Russian giving a scare with a tactical nuclear weapon.
Thus, the limits of the aggressiveness of Putin’s speech are under test, although it is a test in which everyone involved moves their pieces slowly.
