Lawrence Freedman
On 13 September 2024 President Vladimir Putin was asked by Russian state media about the possibility that Ukraine would be allowed ‘to strike targets deep inside Russia using Western long-range weapons.’ Putin’s answer was typically belligerent. The issue, he noted, was not whether Ukraine would be able to hit Russian territory. It had been doing that for some time. The vital point was that Ukrainians could not on their own use ‘cutting-edge high-precision long-range systems supplied by the West’ because they need ‘intelligence data from satellites’, and, even more important, ‘only NATO military personnel can assign flight missions to these missile systems.’
This led to alarmed headlines about threats of nuclear escalation and earnest warnings about the need to take Putin’s threats seriously, including from Josep Borrell, the EU’s chief diplomat. Putin is after all leader of a nuclear power currently engaged in a desperate war. In such fraught circumstances ill-considered decisions could lead to disaster. On 21 September the nuclear message was underlined by a test firing of its newest ICBM, the RS-28 Sarmat, although the effect was diminished when the missile exploded in its silo, destroying the test site.
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