Biden Encourages Ukraine Nuclear Escalation (2)

Greenlighting Ukraine

No, Biden has not come right out and said let’s have a nuke war now! But he seems ever more prepared for that eventuality, knowing as he must that high tension is ever more likely to lead in that direction, whether intentional or accidental.

Proceedings of the International Schiller Institute focus sharply in these past few days on two of the principal manifestations of Western escalation of the NATO war with Russia over Ukraine: the hits on Russian nuclear early warning stations; and western permission to Ukraine to use western weapons against targets in Russia. German Chancellor Scholz this morning has, with Biden, agreed to this.

The BBC reports this morning that US President Joe Biden has given Ukraine permission to use American-supplied weapons to strike targets in Russia, but only near the Kharkiv region, US officials say. The New York Times notes that the implications are much broader and Blinken has ominously made a point of indicating US “adaptability. Other sources say that the Biden decision was actually taken in secret, probably after the Russian offensive on Kharkiv. In public, both the US and Germany up until now had refrained from doing so.

The list of countries that have so far given permission for Ukraine to use their weapons for striking on Russian targets in Russia must now be extended beyond the list that I provided in yesterday’s post. They should also include Denmark and the Netherlands, who clutch at such hopeful alibis as “subject to international law.” The permissions have not all come in at once, but over the past few months. We also know, of course, that Ukraine has frequently used western weapons without bothering with permissions. The relevance of these recent pronouncements seems to be that they highlight what NATO hopes will be the gathering ferocity of Ukrainian attacks on Russia, especially in the Kharkiv area and, in particular to strike at concentrations of Russian troops that are reportedly preparing for further offensives in the Kharkiv, Sumy and Kiev directions. Inclusion of Kiev among the likely points of combat sensitivity is, needless to say, of critical concern to Ukraine and the collective West. I shall also note in passing that Germany has promised another Patriot system to Ukraine and 500 million euros. The main holdouts now against the trend to encourage Ukraine’s attacks on Russian targets are Italy (which has also adamantly said that it will not put boots on the ground), Slovakia and Hungary (whose President Orban is now indicating that Hungary may need to release itself of obligations to NATO). I am uncertain as to the status of Greece and Spain.

Peace Coalition Summary

I shall now summarize some of the points that emerged during the meeting of the Schillar Institute’s International Peace Coalition, today, May 31st (US time zones):

Professor Ted Postol (MIT) in his address to the Coalition this morning speaks to the issue of early warning and the attacks by drones on monitoring stations at Orsk and Armavir. The damage to the radar stations in Armavir has been significant. Russia lacks the capability to look down from space by satellite at nuclear launch positions. Russia may catch up in this respect, but that may take a few years. For the moment, the best that Russia can do is follow the trajectory of an incoming missile only some minutes, five or six, after launch, at the point at which the missile moves into the fan of the given missile detection early warning radar, which I understand to be the horizon, leaving Russia with only eight minutes warning of an attack. And if the radar has been damaged then the warning time is further reduced. Under the best of circumstances, taking all factors into consideration, even when the radar stations are unharmed, there is a loss of seven to thirteen minutes of advance warning, leaving Russian political leadership with just a few minutes to decide how to respond and at the moment we do not know what measures Russia has in place to deal with such a crisis. Under certain conditions determined by human operatives, Russian response missiles could be left to pre-delegated (AI?) systems.

Postol is of the view that we cannot assume that the US political leadership understands this nuclear context of the damage inflicted on Russian early warning radio stations. I would add that if Russia is blind, its vulnerability to Western first strikes is enhanced, a position of weakness which might lead the Russian leadership to engage its own first strike. Postol notes that a single Trident submarine in the Meditteranean has the capability of “destroying Russia”.

German military expert Professor Wilfried Schreiber provides an overview of the scale of nuclear damage - including, I would insert, the impact of widespread fires, long-term smoke cover and inability to grow food - embracing the additional impacts of power blackout and cyber networks. The dangers of escalation, he opines, are rising rapidly. This insanity must be stopped at all costs. The future of Europe, especially, is at stake.

Military expert Lt Col. Ralph Bossard sees the conflict in terms of a NATO ambition to weaken Russia in retaliation for Russia’s annexation (at Crimea’s request, I would note) of Crimea in 20l4. In a context of Russian success on the battlefield it appears that the West has decided to escalate rather than to make concessions to Russia. It is not just Russia that is at risk, but so too in the Middle East, is Iran (as for both countries, I would elaborate, being blinded in terms of early warning makes them more vulnerable than usual), although we can take some small measure of comfort from the potency of Houthi attacks on US assets.

Retired Col. Richard Black says that Biden recognizes that the Ukraine project is collapsing and that if it collapses this will be very damaging for his presidential campaign. Black notes instances of previous US aggressions against Russian assets, including the sabotage to Nord Stream pipelines.

The US, in short, has a history of recklessness. Fortunately, Putin is not reckless but level-headed, in emotional control. President Biden has now reached the point at which he is willing to take a significant chance of starting World War Three. The attacks against the radar stations in Russia - major, strategic systems - could not have happened without US consent. They serve no other purpose other than to blame Russian nuclear deterrence (unrelated, by the way, to the Kharkiv crisis). Ukraine has repeatedly targeted the airbase and other facilities at Engels and striking Russia’s nuclear bomber fleet. Preparations are in hand for the use of planes (F-16s; F-35s?) whose purpose will be to further degrade Russian nuclear defenses, preparations in effect for a Western nuclear first strike.

Russia, seeing this, as of course it must do, must then calculate whether it needs to “get in first,” so to speak (my phraseology). Russian nuclear doctrine is exclusively defensive but there are some limited circumstances in which a first strike is permitted (for example if Russia knows that an enemy is about to attack or if measures are taken that are intended to cripple the nuclear defenses of Russia.

There is a mood among many Americans that it is time to use nuclear weapons. But America does not have the means to destroy all of Russian nuclear warheads: it could destroy Russian civilization but could not destroy all Russian nuclear missiles with preset response times, so that US cities will be “turned into molten glass” as will Berlin, Paris, Stockholm, Oslo and other European capitals. They will be destroyed. Many might survive but the power centers of the western world would be destroyed for all practical purposes. The Ukraine project is not of vital interest to the US, but NATO has decided to stake its existence on Ukraine at the risk of nuclear war, which is increasing dramatically.

Former US ambassador to China, Chas Freeman, in a prepared statement, calls the attacks on Russia’s early warning system a strategic assault on a strategic facility. It is a serious development that is intended to undermine Russian strategic nuclear security. There are 10 such sites, and 20% have been knocked out, and Russia’s system is heavily dependent on its ground system (for reasons that were previously explained by Professor Postol, see above). This danger has not been acknowledged by mainstream media which suggests a frightening level of illiteracy on these matters in the journalistic corps. The US and NATO have set up Ukraine for catastrophe. What we dont know is, following their advances in the North, East and South, whether Russia will now move the goalposts (i.e. away from its original conditions for settlement), the most important of which is the need for a new European security architecture. The West broke off the negotiations in 2022. Freeman notes how Russia has recovered from failed European sanctions threats whose failures could have been, but were not, anticipated, and is turning to the East and to the South, and its economy is booming, while conditions in Ukraine are being “ground to bits,” not least because of Ukraine attacks on remote parts of Russia and Russian responses to these attacks.

I did not attend to the opening remarks of Diane Sare, but I note her later call for more attention to the BRICS as one instance of an emerging global security architecture. The current US election campaign, and media coverage of that campaign is hopelessly adrift, the media being, as they are, mere arms of the military-industrial complex.

There’s another view to all this rather panicky chorus about the targetting of early warning radar and greenlighting Ukrainian deployment of western weapons on Russian targets in Russia. Alexander Mercouris in his daily broadcast today observes, at some length, the factors that have recently been poisoning relations between the Zelenskiy regime and Washington, and opines that Washington, in an effort to defuse Zelenskiy’s growing frustration with the West’s seeming inability to miraculously save Ukraine from the mess into which Zelenskiy, with Washington encouragement, has embroiled it, has made a minor concession in the form of a small digression on established policy. The established policy in Washington was that the US did not formally allow Ukraine to use US weapons on targets in Russia, but that of course it knew that Ukraine was doing this all the time along the combat lines and in the borderlands and further afield. So the minor concession was that Ukraine should formally have the right to target locations in Russia provided that these were related to the Russian invasion of Kharkiv, in response to Russian aggressions. In other words what is commonly interpreted as an escalation may in fact be a form of de-escalation.

There is some element of compromise behind all this, to be sure, but I think it is simpler to think of this as Washington trying to balance the good sense of the realists with the fanatic blood lust of the hardcore neocons, without committing itself to all-out war. Mercouris has a very fine sense of what it is that Russia wants, and I rarely hear him express a viewpoint that is not fundamentally to Russia’s favor. So I wonder if his theory represents a sentiment in Moscow that is very opposed to being seen to make too much fuss about these issues even if Putin has indeed recently told the world that if the West does allow use of Western weapons by Ukraine against targets in Russia then Russia may retaliate against targets in the collective West. But Putin knows that Ukraine has been doing this already for a long time and that when we talk about “Ukraine” doing it we are mostly talking about Ukraine with very considerable help if not direction from the West. In other words there is an element of theater here, from all sides. Maybe we should think of it as a communal dance along the edge of the precipice.

In response to Russian missile and drone attacks tonight (May 31 to June 1) it is reported in Saturday’s Guardian that as air raid alerts were issued across Ukraine, Polish and other allies’ air forces were scrambled suggesting, at the very least, an itchy nervousness on the part of Ukraine’s neighbors, to get involved in the fight.

Why the Idiocy?

I will close my post today with a couple of reflections on the issue of the greenlighting of Ukrainian use of western weapons to strike at Russia. I am struggling to understand the idiocy that is currenty being performed by western leadership. I am going to suggest that it is motivated by a western desire to open up the Russian Federation by means of regime change to much greater Western exploitation of the natural wealth of Russia. Their desperation for this “great steal,” is driven in large measure by their fear of the evolution of multipolarity (remember that I interpret current events within the framework of a Western counterrevolution against multipolarity) and the certainty that the West will lose as the South gains (given that win-win solutions appear to be alient to neocon thinking), and also out of concern that as the economic impacts of climate change grow more severe the West will need easier and cheaper access to resources that may otherwise lie out of their reach. Others have suggested as another motivation, the increasing fragility of the Western financial system which, particularly in the case of the USA, is staggering under the weight of utterly unsustainable debt.

More specifically on Ukraine we should take note of the utter counter-productiveness of these latest Western threats of expanding the missile war. Russia’s buffer zone is designed to protect mainland Russia from long-range missiles; if longer-range missiles come into play then Russia it will have to extend the buffer zone by however many kilometers, 100, 200, 500, it takes to establish security.

The Battlefields

Other than another Ukrainian attack on Crimea, involving 10 ATACMS, which Russia says were all shot down, but inflicting damage to an oil depot in Kavkas Bay, and on a Russian ferry ship, the “Avangard,” of greatest interest today, Friday, is what is going on in the borderlands. The situation overall, so far as key nodal points of Lyptsi and Vovchansk are concerned, is relatively unchanged namely, quiet in Lyptsi and bloody in Vovchansk. Overall, Russia now says it has taken 30 villages in the borderlands area in the direction of Kharkiv, adding a further 880 square miles of territory controlled by Russia. During the period of the Kharkiv offensive, the Russian MoD claims that Ukraine has lost, so far, 35,000 men (dead or badly wounded) and 2,700 weapons. Much of this has resulted from over 300 Lancet attacks on Ukrainian facilities and positions over the past month. Dima of the Military Summary Channel, noting that the Russia advance in the north has been stalled, theorizes that Russia does not need to move further south at the moment given its success in bombing and shelling traffic on the two main supply roads from Kharkiv that can carry men and supplies to Ukrainians close to Vovchansk. One of these, a long route, runs through Artemivka to the southeast of Kharkiv, the other, more direct, through Rubizhne, to the northeast of Kharkiv. Russia is also bombing and shelling settlements much further south.