An angry Putin drew a new red line – This is what happened to the previous ones – 2024-09-14 04:27:00

According to media reports, the United States and Britain are accepting Ukraine’s attacks on Russia with the long-range missiles they provided.

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer will meet US President Joe Biden at the White House on Friday, where the two are scheduled to discuss the issue.

This information has put Russian President Vladimir Putin on his toes. He started talking about it when he spoke in St. Petersburg, where he drew a new “red line” in the hope that it would frighten the United States and Britain to the other side.

Putin interprets that Ukraine’s strikes with US and British or generally Western long-range missiles on Russian soil mean the defense alliance NATO’s direct participation in the war in Ukraine.

– This would essentially change the most essential basic nature and essence of this conflict, Putin said.

– This means that NATO countries, i.e. the United States and European countries, are fighting against Russia.

Putin also pointed out that Ukraine needs data for its attacks on Russia, which it can only get from Western satellites. According to him, only the soldiers of NATO countries are able to determine the trajectory of the missiles for these missile systems.

Putin’s bluster

Putin has drawn red lines before, but Ukraine’s and also the West’s previous actions have shown Putin’s words to be empty.

Already on February 24, 2022, when announcing the “special operation”, Putin warned outside countries not to intervene in the attack.

– Anyone who tries to stand in our way or pose threats to our country and people must know that Russia will respond immediately, he said.

– And the consequences are such that you have not seen the like in your entire history.

Looking at the present moment, Putin’s defiant blustering seems comical, because Russia has not responded, for example, to arms deliveries from the West in any significant way, let alone caused unprecedented consequences.

From the beginning, the West left Putin’s speeches and clear threats about the use of nuclear weapons to their credit by helping Ukraine with, among other things, arms and equipment deliveries. Russia responded to this by reducing natural gas supplies to the West.

Most of Putin’s red lines have already been broken. Only four red lines remain uncrossed after the US and UK give Ukraine permission to use long-range weapons in attacks on Russia.

In September 2021, Putin set his first red lines regarding Ukraine. At that time, he announced that Ukraine must not join NATO and NATO’s military infrastructure must not be built on Ukrainian territory. These lines have not been crossed so far.

After the war started, Ukraine appealed to the West to establish a no-fly zone to protect Ukraine. Putin drew a red line here, which the West has not crossed. NATO has considered setting a no-fly zone as “too risky”.

In the third month of the war, i.e. in April 2022, Putin drew a red line that Russia would not allow other countries to intervene in the war. This line has held, as no third party is directly involved in the war.

Crossed lines

Instead, the West and Ukraine have crossed most of Putin’s red lines.

In September 2021, Putin also banned the sending of Western soldiers to Ukraine. Western volunteers have been fighting in Ukraine since the first days of the war, but the British broadcasting company BBC reported in April 2023 how leaked documents reveal that Western special forces are operating in Ukraine.

In December 2021, Putin announced that the West should not supply weapons to Ukraine. The West practically laughed in Putin’s face by supplying arms to Ukraine right away. At the time, the arms deliveries raised fears in the Western media about a confrontation between NATO and Russia and a world war.

In February 2022, Putin demanded that NATO withdraw its troops and missiles from Russia’s western border and stop its “expansion to the east”. Of course, NATO did not dance to Putin’s whistle, and as a result of the war, Finland and Sweden joined the defense alliance.

In March 2022, Putin tried to stop arms deliveries to the West by defining the new arms deliveries at that time and separately the deliveries of Mig-29 fighters as one red line. The West continued arms deliveries and also supplied Mig-29 fighters to Ukraine.

Russia responded by defining the arms shipments as a “legitimate target” and threatening to destroy Ukraine’s MiG fighters.

In the following months, Putin rushed to draw more red lines. Among other things, he prohibited the delivery of long-range missiles to Ukraine, the firing of Western missiles at Russia, the handover of old Soviet tanks to Ukraine, and the delivery of German “lethal weapons” to Ukraine.

All but one of the above lines were crossed practically immediately after Putin’s threats. Attacks on Russia with Western missiles, on the other hand, did not start until December 2023.

In September 2022, Putin also defined Russian counterattacks on the battlefield, long-range missiles at Himars or similar systems, and the violation of its territorial integrity as a red line. The most recent of these was broken in August of this year, when Ukraine started a ground operation in Kursk.

Later, with his threats, Putin has unsuccessfully tried to prevent the Patriot anti-aircraft systems, modern Western tanks, F-16 fighter jets and attacks on Russia made with Himars, Storm Shadow missiles or Atacms missiles.

Putin’s success

In that sense, however, Putin’s threats have succeeded in that they have delayed Western countries’ decision-making on arms deliveries.

– Many of the more effective weapon systems delivered to Ukraine have had to undergo a numbing twist because Russia has gotten its message across, which is why the threat of escalation has been respected over the security goals of Ukraine and the West, Iltalehti’s military expert Emil Kastehelmi estimated in August.

However, Arkady Moshes, program director of the Institute for Foreign Policy, pointed out that the Western countries, through the internal debate, have continuously given heavier support to Ukraine.

– During the first ten months of the war, the West switched from helmets to supplying Patriot missile systems. In 2023, countries such as Great Britain were already of the opinion that the weapons they provided could be used in attacks on Russian soil, Moshes said at the time.