Summary by Geopolist | Istanbul Center for Geopolitics:
The article discusses how Russia pursued, up until now, what Moscow described as the “red lines” concerning the conflict in Ukraine, with a particular emphasis on military support given to Kyiv by the West. While Moscow repeatedly warned NATO and other Western countries that crossing the red line with arms deliveries and other supplies would receive a forceful response, in reality, it did less than might be expected.
Some key details include:
Red Lines of Russia: Over the course of the war, Moscow identified several “red lines”-a guarantee that if NATO countries cross these lines by providing weapons or any such action to support Ukraine, then a severe punishment will be given. As NATO and Western countries boosted their military aid with modern advanced weapons systems, the response from Russia is less forceful than its rhetoric earlier suggested.
Difficulty to Retaliate: Among the strong reasons is that it is practically challenging for Russia to enforce any red lines. Russia could, in principle, start arming nations that resist the West, such as North Korea, Iran, or Venezuela, among others. However, this would come with great risks, as such actions might destabilize regions where Russia itself has interest-for instance, the Middle East with Iran being next to Israel, or in East Asia, where it enjoys relations with South Korea.
Variables limiting Internal Escalation: It is also subject to limitations brought about by the low military and economic capacity of Russia to the escalation of further actions in the war. In the article, there is a suggestion that although the escalation either through the intensification of military action by Russian forces or the extension of war into further NATO territory as in the latter case seems possible, this can again cause Russian overstretch and may incite further direct Western involvement which the latter will want to avoid.
Nuclear Threats and Reality: Though nuclear threats have occasionally been made, these remain largely rhetorical. The risk of global escalation makes actual nuclear retaliation improbable. According to the article, although the threats by Russia raise concerns with its nuclear weapons, it is unbelievable that this could actually be implemented due to the catastrophic consequences this would lead to globally.
Alliance and Diplomatic Gestures: Russia’s relation with all other major non-Western actors, such as China, India, and Israel, has also been an influencing force for its restraint. Moscow does not want to sacrifice its general diplomatic position by over-investments in adversarial acts that may estrange these partners.
Strategic Patience: This article would go on to argue that perhaps Russia is simply betting on strategic patience-the supposition that over time, due to either economic pressures or political changes within those NATO countries, Western support for Ukraine will dwindle. Sustained Western unity in support of Ukraine may eventually fracture, especially as this war drags on and economic burdens increase for European countries.
All in all, the piece shows very well how Russia finds itself in a baroque position, one where it cannot enforce its red lines properly without stumbling into bigger geopolitical risks, and yet it cannot back away from Ukraine. This has led to a more measured response than might have been expected by the severity of Russia’s warnings.
Read the full article below.
Ukraine and West are crossing red lines. Why isn’t Russia reacting?
The world of Cold War-era espionage was famously described by former CIA counterintelligence chief James Jesus Angleton as a wilderness of mirrors, one of those rare coinages that so beautifully captures its subject matter as to require little by way of elaboration.
The wilderness of mirrors is itself a rather brilliant literary appropriation from T.S. Eliot’s 1920 poem Gerontion, a hauntingly foreboding portrait of interwar abjection that gripped a generation of Europeans hurtling at breakneck speed toward another, even greater calamity lurking just around the corner.
Angleton plucked this phrase from its original, admittedly vastly different context to capture the grasping in the dark — or, as Eliot put it, braving life’s many “cunning passages” and “contrived corridors” only to arrive at a distant echo of the truth — that is part and parcel of intelligence and counterintelligence work.
But these problems of perception are no less salient in the peripheral world of statecraft, where leaders must deter adversaries and uphold international commitments not, for the most part, by their actions but by the signals they transmit to their counterparts. The structure of the international system is held aloft by these signals and the vast array of policies, institutions, and arrangements underpinning them.
The basic currency behind signaling is credibility, backed by a commensurate capability to make good on the signal one is trying to send. For instance, the NATO alliance and its collective defense provision, Article 5, rest on America’s assurance that it will come to the defense of its European partners if they are subject to aggression by another state. As I have written with my colleagues Anatol Lieven and George Beebe, all the available evidence suggests that the Russian leadership more or less sees this U.S. security assurance as credible and shapes its approach toward NATO’s eastern flank accordingly.
Meanwhile, Russia’s most formidable challenge — one that rivals and potentially outstrips the battlefield difficulties it is facing in Ukraine and, now, its border region of Kursk– has been finding ways to credibly deter the West from continuing to aid and supply Ukraine. Just under 30 months ago, the day the invasion commenced, Russian President Vladimir Putin warned that anyone who interferes will suffer “consequences like you have never seen.”
Since then, the West has successfully coordinated a colossal, by some measures unprecedented security assistance operation for Ukraine, steadily deepening its involvement with new types of weaponry and by relaxing or altogether abandoning its previous injunctions curbing Ukraine’s ability to strike within internationally recognized Russian territory.
Moscow enjoys a considerable degree of deterrence on the question of direct Western intervention in the war, if for no other reason than the eventuality of such a move spilling into a wider regional war one hair’s breadth removed from a nuclear confrontation. But the same cannot be said of its ability to deter the West from doing all it can to aid Ukraine indirectly.
Putin’s latest scheme to dissuade further Western involvement in the Ukraine war was to threaten to arm the West’s adversaries in retaliation, supposedly under the belief that this policy would raise costs on Ukraine’s Western partners such that they would either back down or at least refrain from further deepening their commitment to Kyiv.
Yet, three months later, Russia has yet to make good on this threat. As it turns out, this kind of punitive tit for tat was never quite fit for purpose, not least because Russia lacks the capacity to make good on it without running a red pen through other parts of its global portfolio of military, economic, and political interests.
Just as the Kremlin was reportedly getting ready to arm the Houthi rebels in Yemen against the United States, Washington coordinated a diplomatic push with Saudi Arabia to stay Moscow’s hand. Russia and North Korea signed a defense pact in June, advertised by both sides with much pomp, but there is no evidence to date that the Russians are planning to send any major weapons shipments to North Korea. It’s so far been the other way around, with the DPRK shipping millions of artillery shells to Russia.
Perhaps the North Koreans believe themselves to be benefiting in other ways, including the political leverage their relations with Russia give them over their prime benefactor and partner, China, but there has not been anything approximating a comparable exchange of weapons between Moscow and Pyongyang.
It’s not difficult to see why: any large-scale effort to arm the DPRK could prove fatal to Russia’s relations with South Korea, which have not completely tanked following the 2022 Ukraine invasion despite the ROK’s tight-knit partnership with Washington and obvious susceptibility to U.S. interests. Beijing, too, would be left unsmiling by the destabilizing effects that large Russian arms infusions into North Korea could exercise throughout the region, and the China relationship is one Russia can ill afford to complicate.
Turning to the Middle East, Iran emerges as an obvious candidate for Russia’s generosity — it is, after all, a U.S. adversary locked in a bitter struggle with one of America’s closest allies, Israel. But here, too, the Kremlin finds itself navigating gingerly between Scylla and Charybdis.
Part of Russia’s complex Middle East strategy following its intervention in the Syrian civil war has been to support a stable, partner-level relationship with Israel. Both Putin and his Israeli counterpart Bibi Netanyahu regard cordial ties between their two countries as a personal achievement, and they have been remarkably loath to jettison this relationship even as the Ukraine war and 2023 Gaza War have found them on different sides of the barricade.
Though Moscow has recurrently needled Israel over its conduct in Gaza, these kinds of rhetorical pinpricks are one thing; supplying Israel’s avowed Iranian enemy with major weapons systems is quite another, and, so far, not a bridge Putin has been willing to cross.
Simply put, Russia is running out of Western enemies that can be armed without negatively impacting its own interests. Smaller potential players remain in Latin America and parts of Africa, but in these cases, the impact of such provisions is likely to be far too small to carry the punitive effect that is Russia’s raison d’être for pursuing this arms transfer policy in the first place.
The conundrum Moscow finds itself in reveals a deeper facet of its war effort in Ukraine: Moscow’s ability to maintain relationships with almost the entire non-Western world in spite of the West’s persistent isolation campaign is both an asset and a liability. It buffers Russia from Western economic and diplomatic pressures that may otherwise have successfully crippled it in the war’s opening stages. But these relationships also carry with them a set of barriers constraining Moscow from pursuing many forms of escalation and retaliation.
These limitations point to a wilderness of mirrors that has developed around the war in Ukraine — a set of expectations and norms that, though never codified and largely unspoken, nevertheless has a real disciplining effect on its participants. This logic should be studied more deeply and integrated as part of the U.S. policy toolkit for bringing the war to a close on maximally advantageous terms for the West and Ukraine.
By: Mark Episkopos – a Eurasia Research Fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. He is also an Adjunct Professor of History at Marymount University. Episkopos holds a PhD in history from American University and a masters degree in international affairs from Boston University.
Source: responsiblestatecraft.org
