According to a Wall Street Journal report citing US intelligence, Russia could be preparing a limited incursion against a NATO member state within weeks. The report comes as the war in Ukraine remains largely deadlocked and the impact of the conflict is increasingly felt inside Russia.
Analysts cited in the report suggest Vladimir Putin may seek to open a new front rather than risk being remembered as the leader who lost Ukraine, raising fresh questions about NATO’s readiness and resolve.
This doesn’t make any sense. NATO is much stronger than it was before the war. Russia is much weaker.
The Baltic States started the war isolated, partially surrounded by Russia. Today they sit in a NATO lake that can not only support the Baltics, but threaten St Petersburg.
Russia would have to defend a front stretching from the Black sea to the Arctic sea.
Even if the US declined to help, Russia starts in a position of great weakness. And worse still, everyone knows it.
Putin needs a defeat from NATO, not from Ukraine alone. If he loses to the biggest military alliance of the world, he might be able to somewhat sell it to the public on the home front. It would also play right into the propaganda they’ve been spewing that Russia is fighting the collective West.
It’s probably seriously frustrating for Putin to keep poking NATO with drones or other stuff and not get anybody retaliating.
not getting a reaction when he annexed crimea in 2014 was exactly what got us into the current situation
Agreed, but if I had a dollar for every time the world did something stupid and non-sensical I would be emperor of Earth.
Non-sensical to you or non-sensical to the people in power?
Russia’s invasion if Ukraine , for example, makes perfect sense if you’re a dictator surrounded by yes-men blowing smoke up your ass about your amazing military strength for years (while they take the military money and spend it on yachts in the Mediterranean)
I really doubt Putin would make this particular mistake twice though
Honestly, invading Ukraine made sense. The resolve and heroism of Ukrainians in the first days (snake island, Zelensky’s “I don’t need a ride, I need weapons”) is what turned the war into what it is.
If you want a stupid example use Hormuz; very well studied that it fucks up whoever attacks there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Khasham
Can they hide that?
The paranoid schizophrenic who chopped a stranger’s head off on a bus, unprovoked, thought he was reasonable - a demon intent on acts of unspeakable evil had to be destroyed. :/
Yes, and humans with rabies will refuse to drink, even though they need water to survive. Decisions made under literal medical delusions aren’t stupid or nonsensical, they’re misinformed and inherently alogical.
The point is it felt reasonable at the time to the individual.
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It makes a lot of sense. You’re ignoring what a realistic action and response would look like.
The goal wouldn’t be to conquer large swathes of NATO territory. The goal would be to test the integrity of the NATO alliance, and to see if the Russian sympathizer sitting in the White House will renege on the US’s obligations.
Imagine Putin sends a few hundred troops over the border and seizes a small amount of land. NATO is not going to use that as an excuse to launch a total war against Russia. Sure, if the full might of the Russian army comes storming into Poland, NATO would let loose everything we have. But a limited incursion like in Georgia? If NATO is living up to its promises, sufficient force would be deployed to drive them out. There would be no need to launch a total war.
This would be a way to test the NATO alliance at relatively low cost and risk. We don’t actually know how Trump would respond to this. He could very well say, “not our problem” and refuse to render aid. If he did command the US military to defend NATO territory, then the cost to Russia would be small. A few hundred casualties in a war that’s caused hundreds of thousands. A rounding error. A small price to pay.
But imagine what Putin gains if Trump doesn’t offer assistance against even a small incursion. NATO’s guarantees will have proven fruitless. Even if someone more friendly to NATO gets elected after Trump, the promise will still be broken. Every NATO member from then on knows that the NATO guarantees cannot be relied upon. A guarantee that is subject to the whims of which American political party is in power is not a guarantee that nations can rely on for their national defense.
That bus has already left the station, and the other NATO countries know it. The only open question is how weak Putin will have to be before Trump flip-flops so that he can still be on what he perceives to be the winning side.
If he does send a few hundred to steal some land, and gets pushed out, its not simply a matter of small price to pay, it could potentially change the entire landscape of the Ukraine war by changing how other countries support them. Its a pretty big gamble that they’ll do nothing.
The opposite could also happen. Countries facing direct threats to their own territory are less able to provide military aid.
I think that would be less likely. They’ll see that the threat can be neutered via Ukraine and turn to them rather than simply wait it out which would result in a higher likelyhood of another attempt.
Are they specialised in this new type of war, though? I saw something about Americans being wiped out in simulated exercises against Ukrainian drone operators - and the Russians will be bringing that kind of experience to someone who has only been learning in classrooms from Ukrainians.
Although they did initially get “wiped out”, but (from the article):
Which is the point of these exercises. It’ll still take time to modify doctrine and train, but the US is now more practically informed on this type of warfare.
This is a half-formed thought but Russia is quite strong in exactly one way: nuclear warhead count. That doesn’t help him resupply Crimea but perhaps he’s trying to change the scope or scale of the conflict in a way that would make this strength more relevant?