Summary
President Biden recently authorized Ukraine to use longer-range U.S. missiles to strike inside Russia, marking a small but overdue escalation in the conflict.
This decision aims to disrupt Russia’s military operations and bolster Ukraine’s position, especially with the potential Trump administration favoring pro-Russian policies.
Russia’s retaliatory missile strike on Ukraine, though deadly, represents more of the same tactics.
Analysts argue Biden’s earlier caution was excessive, and calling Russia’s nuclear bluffs is strategically necessary to counter further extortion.
Biden isn’t escalating the war, he is slow-walking the aid. Too much to die, too little to live, as the Ukrainians say. If you give Russia 9 months to pull critical assests out of range and only allow strikes deep into Russia after a whole nother nations enters the war on the side of Russia, you can’t frame that as escalatory, no matter how much Putin bitches and moans.
Hmmm. My idea of the process is a little different. Embedded CIA reports to the DOD on daily to and fro of the war. What the Ukrainians needed yesterday isn’t necessarily what they will need tomorrow. Wars evolve. The DOD takes this information and projects future needs leading to a budget recommendation to Congress. Congress creates a budget bill and passes it. Johnson sitting on that bill, BTW, put Ukraine behind the 8 ball. Biden uses that allocation to buy weapons per the DOD recommendations. Rules placed on weapons use, such as not using US missiles on Russian ground, are meant to stop escalation into NATO entering into the conflict. In fact when that rule ochanged there was an escalation, but not involving NATO, yet.
I think it’s pretty clearly the goal of NATO to keep Russia stuck in a prolonged war in Ukraine, which it’s been very successful so far.
The right thing, done far too late.
Meanwhile, several thousand miles to the south…
It’s way too late. Unless we are pro-war now it would’ve been better to make a peace plan before the other guy is in office.
I’m actually pretty doubtful that Russia still has much of a nuclear capacity. Maintaining a nuclear arsenal is very expensive, and the Russian oligarchs have been embezzling massive amounts of money from the military.
They’ve had to resort to asking NK for help, so I don’t think they have a good chance of winning the current conflict, much less an actual NATO power.
Russia isn’t starting WW3, because there’s literally no possible way for them to survive doing that.
They can’t even beat Ukraine in a straight fight, and they know it. They are woefully ill equipped to take on all of NATO.
No matter how much damage they could potentially do if they tried, the ending is guaranteed; Russia and its current leadership do not exist.
The Russian leadership are vain, greedy, and power hungry, and the thing about those traits is they make you very, very averse to personal risk. They’re not going to take any action that puts them in the firing line.