Russian strikes on and around the west Ukrainian city of Lviv in the past few days including, most recently, a strike on an airfield that caused significant damage to fighter jets on the ground indicate that Ukraine has been unable to re-secure as tight an air defense capability as it once possessed. We know that many Patriots have been destroyed. We know that of the six F-16s that recently arrived in Ukraine, one was destroyed either by Russian fire or in an accident. Others are said to have played a role in air defense although their total impact so far appears slight.
Following a recent meeting in Ramstein of Ukraine’s sponsors, US secretary of defense, Lloyd Austin, has retained the US prohibition on Ukrainian use of Western long-range missiles against targets in Russia.
It is entirely plausible that this may represent the outcome of a covert US deal with Russia. Russia had threatened that US greenlighting of the use of long range missiles against Russia might trigger the supply of equivalent Russian arms to enemies of the West such as the Houthis of Yemen who have already inflicted significant damage on Western trade through the Red Sea in retaliation for Israeli genocide of Palestinians. So it would make sense for the US and Russia to cut a deal for as long as both parties can restrain their hawks.
I get the impression that the bases for Western hawkishness are flagging somewhat amidst pre-election uncertainties and anxieties in the US and growing hostility against aid to Ukraine in Germany in the wake of recent electoral successes of the AfD and the BSW whose main problem in the eyes of the governing SPD-led coalition and the establishment opposition CDU party is that these newer parties are responding to the real issues that the electorate care about - something the establishment describes as “extreme.”
In Russia, I suspect the strength of the hawks is increasing as they begin to suspect that Putin is already or will go soft, and that the West knows this This perspective depends heavily on the view that the Kursk invasion has indeed been a major embarrassment to, and set-back for, the Putin administration especially given Russia’s perennial vulnerability to the West’s superiority in the propaganda war. Hawks fear that Putin will settle for Russia’s minimalist aims (acknowledgment of Crimea and the unoccupied territories of Donetsk, Luhansk, Zapporizhzhia and Kherson as Russian) plus Ukrainian neutrality vis-a-vis NATO, but whitewashing earlier demands for demilitarization and denazification.
A “soft” resolution of this kind might be fine and dandy for the capitalist and oligarch class whom Putin mainly represents but will be very objectionable to Russian nationalists and the military.
These considerations may go hand in hand with a relative de-escalation at Ramstein of Western gifting of Western taxpayer wealth to Ukraine, iconized by the reduction in Germany’s latest package of weapons aid that includes only 70 Leopard One tanks whose history goes back to World War One.
Notwithstanding the prohibition on use of long-range missiles on targets in Russia, the West continues to gift such missiles for use on the battlefield and to escalate in terms of the type of missile it supplies as in the matter of JSSMS, whose advantage of stealth is undermined by reliance on GPS which Russian electronic warfare may be well equipped to hack.
The backbone of Russian missile strength is the triad of Islandar-Kinzhal-Avangard hypersonic missiles, one that is probably superior in quality and quantity to anything NATO can put up. Talk of Western supply of a couple of hundred or so JSSMS needs to be placed in the context of: (1) the 10000 cruise missiles that Russia has already fired on Ukraine in this war, (2) of Ukraine’s ability to keep fighting nonetheless, and (3) the vast geographic scale of the Russian Federation. In other words, all the missiles supplied to Ukraine have done little or nothing to make Russia desist, and while Russian missile offensives on Ukraine have been devastating they have not yet forced Ukraine to desist. Why then would one expect that the far, far more extensive territory of Russia will succumb to a few more Western missiles fired from Ukraine?