Missile Double-Cross

The true target of the West's missile escalation may well be Kiev

Note: When I finished this text on 13 September, it seemed to me that the official US permission to use at least Storm Shadows for strikes deep into Russia was about to be given publicly. This has not yet happened. I believe, however, that, unfortunately, the issue has not gone away, and the next escalation may happen very soon. It is also, of course, possible that decisions have been made but are withheld from the public. Either way, I think that this article’s key arguments remain sadly relevant.

The predictable and predicted is happening again. Despite the coyly teasing dance of seven veils performed by, mostly, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, to those who ignored the noise and focused on the signal, it’s always been clear that Washington and London would decide to – officially and openly – allow and help Ukraine to use their missiles for attacks even deeper into Russia than before. And of course, it’s been obvious to Moscow as well, as Dmitry Peskov, President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman, made clear as early as September 11.

That the West is escalating is no surprise. It has a well-established pattern of continually ratcheting-up the stakes in its proxy war – including (but not restricted to) the supply of intelligence, mercenaries, ‘advisors’, various tanks, armored vehicles, missile systems, and recently F-16 fighter planes. Now it’s time to fully unleash Storm Shadow and then, if perhaps a little later, long-range ATACMS missiles. What we can safely disregard is the pretext of Iran allegedly shipping short-range ballistic missiles to Russia. It’s either simply untrue or irrelevant. 

Tehran denies the American claim. Those ready to scoff at that should recall that the West has a rock-solid record of making things up, from Iraqi WMDs to Israel’s legally strictly non-existing ‘right’ to defend itself against those it occupies and genocides. And even if Iran has handed over missiles – as, by the way, it would have an actual right to do as a sovereign state – that is not why this specific Western escalation is occurring now. 

The real reason why the restrictions on the use of Western missiles are coming off at this point in the war is that Kiev is even more desperate than usual. With Russia first containing Kiev’s Kursk Kamikaze incursion and now launching devastating counter-attacks, the Ukrainian operation has turned into the bloody waste it was destined to be, while Moscow’s forces are accelerating their advances elsewhere, as even the stalwartly pro-Kiev New York Times is admitting.

Not that adding deeper missile strikes will save the Zelensky regime from defeat and probably collapse. For one thing, Ukraine does not have a large supply of these weapons, and given Western politics and lack of production capacities, it never will. Kiev may get lucky and do some limited damage, but – as with earlier silver bullets – the missiles cannot change the course of the war. Russian countermeasures will greatly blunt their impact in any case. But the Zelensky regime has a habit of clinging to one straw after the other. And, in addition, Zelensky’s team is pursuing its usual double strategy of seeking spectacular attacks that can feed propaganda at home and abroad, as well as perhaps finally escalate the war into an open regional, that is European, or even global conflict. For that apocalyptic escalation is Kiev’s last – if insane and suicidal – chance of staving off defeat.

The risk of things getting out of hand beyond Ukraine is obvious. For those too slow to grasp them, Putin has just spelled out the essence of the issue. Since Ukraine can only target and launch these missiles with indispensable Western, that is, NATO assistance, their use will mean that NATO is at war with Russia. Some things need explaining in the West nowadays: If you shoot at a country or take part in shooting at it, you enter into direct armed conflict with it. Period.

But NATO acting in a way that establishes a state of war between it and Russia does not predetermine how exactly Moscow will react. As before, with the West provoking Russia in ways that should have remained unimaginable, it will be up to Russia to be the adult in the international room, exercise enormous restraint, and smother the general conflagration that the West seems so desperate to start. The good news here is that the Russian leadership is very likely to do just that. It is true that Western missiles fired deep into Russia with the help of Western logistics and hands-on assistance in Ukraine – remember those German Luftwaffe generals spilling the beans on that? – would be a legitimate reason for Moscow to strike not only at Ukraine but at the West, for instance at NATO bases in Poland and Romania. 

But Russia is virtually certain not to do so, because it is winning the war against both Kiev and its Western sponsors inside Ukraine. Moscow has no reason to do the Zelensky regime a huge favor by taking the bait and escalating to an open war beyond this theater. How can we be so certain? Because it makes sense and the Russian leadership has a habit of being sensible, and in addition because they have just told us so. Peskov had two things to say about Russia’s handling of future Ukrainian long-range strikes with Western missiles: that there will be an “appropriate” response and that “there is no need to expect some kind of response everywhere,” since the war in Ukraine – or, as Peskov put it, using the official Russian designation, the “Special Military Operation” – already is that response.

Note that no one in Moscow has ruled out that it could go beyond Ukraine. But a direct assault on British or US assets, even if perfectly legitimate, would still make little sense. Russia always has the option of paying its Western opponents back in their own coin by equipping their opponents with better arms. That would be a quid pro quo as perfectly symmetrical as it can get in the real world. And Putin has of course already referred to precisely that possibility.

Peskov’s statement also raises another issue that Kiev should be very worried about, if the Zelensky regime were rational, which it is not. Let’s recall one simple fact: Ukraine’s Western supporters are friends from hell. Behind their rhetoric of “values” and “as long as it takes,” their policy toward Ukraine has been to exploit it as a proxy war pawn for their own misconceived geopolitical purposes. Now these same lethal ‘friends’ are graciously permitting Kiev to use their missiles to strike deeper into Russia. Yet if one thing about the Russian response is predictable, then that is that its first target will be Ukraine. Whatever Moscow may or may not decide to do about its Western de facto enemies, it will hit its Ukrainian direct opponent first.

Are we to believe that no one in Washington and London has considered this inevitable Russian counter-escalation by way of retaliation against Ukraine? Of course they have. And yet they are inviting it. How can we explain this? Consider this: As it happens, at exactly the same time that the missile restrictions are loosened with great fanfare, Kiev is also receiving Western signals that it is time to lower its expectations. For instance, in a recent Wall Street Journal article calling for “pragmatism” and “realism.” 

The West is now pushing Ukraine to be ready for compromises and concessions it has long ruled out. At long last, but so late indeed. One way to read this coincidence, which is definitely no coincidence, would be to explain it as a simple trade-off: Washington and London allow and help Ukraine to fire off a few more missiles even farther than before, purportedly to “improve the negotiating position,” and in return Kiev has to become more flexible about ending the war. 

Yet that would be a simplistic interpretation because firstly, Western geopolitics is more Machiavellian than that and secondly, it is obvious that Kiev will not improve but only further worsen its negotiating position and as a matter of fact, its position as such. Here is a more realistic hypothesis: Ukraine’s friends from hell will quietly welcome Ukraine being battered even worse by a retaliating Russia because that, in turn, will make Kiev more flexible when it comes to negotiations. And both the US and its UK sidekick, as well as the West in general would find it easier to wind down the war if they could point to Kiev throwing in the towel first: “Look,” they’ll tell us, “we’ve always said we’d help Ukraine to the end, but now they themselves want an end.” Ukraine sold out once more but with, for the naive, “agency” galore. 

Consider also that in the process of ending this war, as former Indian foreign secretary Kanwal Sibal has pointed out, the West is almost certain to face a deeply humiliating climb-down. This won’t be a mere crushing defeat for it, but a fundamental moral self-destruction too. Because Russia will impose a solution based on the peace agreement almost reached in Istanbul in the spring of 2022, plus additional territorial losses for Ukraine. But then the West’s sabotaging of that agreement – just admitted once more, this time by Victoria Nuland – and everything that it and Kiev have done since then will be revealed as one huge, wasteful fiasco. A fiasco within, as it were, the fiasco of the policy of turning Ukraine into a proxy of NATO expansion and then war against Russia.

This would be akin to what happened toward the end of another enormous US proxy cluster-mess, the Vietnam War. The Paris Peace Accords of 1973 did not actually end that conflict. That happened later when Washington’s proxy South Vietnam was overrun and abolished in 1975. But the Paris agreement served as an exit for the defeated US. 

The bloody irony was, of course, that a very similar deal had been available already in 1969. As historian Paul Thomas Chamberlin has correctly underlined, everyone who died between then and 1973 – that is, 20,000 Americans, hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese, and quite a few Cambodians – died not only for the general insanity of US overreach but for strictly nothing at all, an empirically measurable zero between what could have been settled in 1969 and was only signed in 1973. One day, the distance between the Istanbul peace option of spring 2022 and whatever agreement finally ends the Ukraine War will look very similar.

The permission for Ukraine to use Western missiles for long-range attacks on Russia is, in a terrible way, all too typical. It is yet another poison pill presented to Kiev as a form of ‘support’ and even ‘friendship’. Its real purpose is likely to be as sinister and selfish as can be, namely, to prepare the West’s way out of a lost proxy war it should never have provoked and should have let Ukraine end more than two years ago. One day, Ukrainians will be free to ask what all this was for and about. On that day, Zelensky and his team better not be within their reach anymore.  

First published on RT.com, 13 September 2024