James W. Carden
Last week’s decision by Russian president Vladimir Putin to launch an intermediate-range ballistic missile against a military complex located in the Ukrainian city of Dnipro (population 937,000) was a response to a prior Ukrainian attack on Russian territory that made use of American-made ATACM and British-made Storm Shadow ballistic missiles. This is but the latest in a series of alarming escalatory moves from both sides of the conflict. Worryingly, the same people who assured us Russia would acquiesce to NATO’s enlargement to its borders are now assuring us that Putin’s repeated threats to resort to nuclear weapons are nothing to worry about.
In a televised speech on November 21, Putin warned that, “We consider ourselves entitled to use our weapons against military facilities of those countries that allow their weapons to be used against our facilities.”
Dr. Stephen Starr, who served as the Director of the Clinical Laboratory Science Program at the University of Missouri points out,
The U.S. ATACM and UK Storm Shadow missile attacks directed and conducted against Russian territory, have had no prospect of changing the outcome of the Ukraine War. Russia has already won. The U.S., NATO, and their proxy Ukraine have been decisively defeated on the battlefield by a Russian military armed with a host of weapons far superior to anything possessed by the West—all at the terrible expense of the people of Ukraine, who have lost well over a million killed and wounded, with their nation utterly destroyed.
All this comes fast on the heels of Russia’s announcement, also made last week, that Russia has amended its nuclear doctrine by lowering its threshold for a nuclear strike. Going forward, Moscow will consider an attack by a non-nuclear country that is supported by nuclear-armed powers as a joint attack.
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