by mobilizing 40 countries and providing a budget of 33 billion dollars for Ukraine, Washington chooses to ignore Vladimir Putin’s threats to use nuclear weapons and confronts Moscow in a less and less veiled way, apparently not afraid not to push the Russian president to his limits.
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The day after a meeting organized by Washington in Ramstein, Germany, to organize the support of about 40 countries for Ukraine, Mr. Putin on Wednesday promised a response “fast and blistering” in the event of external intervention in the conflict. The Russian President mentioned “these tools that no one else can currently boast of”a thinly veiled allusion to the tactical nuclear weapon, which Russian military doctrine provides for the use to force an adversary to retreat.
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Far from backing down, Joe Biden replied the next day by asking Congress for a colossal budget extension of 33 billion dollars, of which 20 billion must go to the supply of armaments, that is to say almost seven times more than the quantities, however impressive, of arms and ammunition already supplied to Ukraine since the Russian invasion, launched on February 24. The US administration is now delivering heavy weaponry to kyiv, such as artillery, helicopters and drones, after long reluctance to do so for fear of spreading the conflict to other NATO countries .
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This concern seems to have disappeared in Washington, where the Minister of Defense, Lloyd Austin, gave himself the objective on Monday of “to see Russia weakened to such a degree that it cannot do the same sort of things as the invasion of Ukraine”, returning from a visit to kyiv. Within the US government, the nuclear threat from Russia has now been brushed aside. Joe Biden thus lambasted the threats on Thursday « irresponsible » of Vladimir Putin, and judged that they showed “the sense of despair felt by Russia, confronted with its miserable failure with regard to its initial objectives”. And on Friday, a senior Pentagon official claimed that Washington “does not believe there is a risk of the use of nuclear weapons or that NATO territory is threatened”.
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For Lawrence Freedman, Emeritus Professor at King’s College London, the various threats from Russia “are taken less seriously than before”. “It’s already a diminished power”he adds on son blog. Conclusions shared by Gideon Rose, of the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. “Moscow will not use nuclear weapons during the conflict”he says in the revue Foreign Affairs. Vladimir Poutine “knows that extraordinary reprisals and universal opprobrium would follow, without any strategic advantage being able to justify them, besides the radioactive effects that this would cause could easily fall on Russia”he adds.
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Even though Mr. Biden claims that the United States “do not attack Russia”, Washington has just given a boost to deliveries of military equipment to Ukraine, and is now openly training Ukrainian soldiers in American heavy weapons, after having done so discreetly. The conflict therefore takes on all the appearances of a “proxy war” against Moscow, through the Ukrainians, notes Sam Winter-Levy, of Princeton University, on the specialist blog War on the Rocks.
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