War between Ukraine and Russia: Kremlin says Biden ‘throws fuel on fire’ by allowing Ukraine to use US missiles in Russia

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Analysis

The West must calculate how far it can go in supporting Ukraine

Frank Gardner
Security correspondent

From the moment Russian forces launched their all-out attack on Ukraine on February 24, 2022, NATO, the West and especially the White House faced one overriding challenge: how to provide Ukraine with sufficient military support without entering into a direct confrontation with Russia to be carried away? ?

That challenge remains today.

The more hawkish commentators in the West, including former US and British generals, have argued that Russian President Putin’s repeated threats were always empty bluffs, that they were simply intended to deter NATO from sending the kind of weapons Ukraine so desperately needed.

Jake Sullivan, the US National Security Advisor, is known to be particularly cautious on this issue and is said to be irritated by Britain’s bend-over attitude towards sending heavy weapons such as main battle tanks and F-16 fighter jets.

Ultimately, Putin knows that the old Cold War concept of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) still holds true.

Russia may have the largest arsenal of nuclear warheads in the world, but he knows that if they were ever used against Western cities, Moscow would be destroyed in minutes.

However, there are many other, less apocalyptic ways that Russia could respond to the use of ATACMS missiles against Russia, including sabotaging submarine cables and arming the Houthis in Yemen with powerful anti-ship missiles.