Global war a step closer
FULL EURO COMBAT FEAR AS PUTIN MULLS NEXT MOVE
FEARS are growing that Russian President Vladimir Putin could declare all out war with Europe today, allowing him to impose martial law and call out conscripts for combat. And analysts say a limited nuclear strike on Ukraine cannot be ruled out.
An increasingly frustrated Russian leader has said the continued supply of weapons to Ukraine by Europe and others, including Australia, effectively put them at faux war with Russia.
The US on the weekend dispatched another $211 million of fighting hardware including artillery munitions and electronic jammers bringing their commitment to more than $5.4 billion, with President Joe Biden now urging Congress to commit another $20 billion in military aid.
The US has also been providing Ukraine’s military with critical real-time classified intelligence that has allowed them to kill Russian generals on the frontline and was used to sink Russia’s flagship battleship last month.
For days President Putin and the Kremlin have been hinting at an imminent announcement and analysts say May 9, when Russia celebrates Victory Day marking the Soviet Union’s defeat of Nazi Germany, will be used to announce his move.
This could also include Mr Putin (inset left) declaring the eastern half of Ukraine will be formally annexed, although the territory is far from lost as NATO continues to pump weapons into the region to help Ukrainian forces.
The 69-year-old Kremlin leader has repeatedly likened the war in Ukraine to the challenge the Soviet Union faced when Adolf Hitler’s Nazis invaded in 1941.
Australian Security Policy Institute analyst Malcolm Davis said as Russia struggled with conventional warfare, a nuclear attack could be his strategy to “escalate to de-escalate” in which a low-yield nuclear weapon is detonated on Ukraine.
“Russia’s explicit and implicit nuclear posturing sets a dangerous precedent of threats to coerce, in which any response may lead to uncontrolled escalation to nuclear war,” he said.
“In the Indo-Pacific, we’d need to consider the prospect that China might alter or abandon its no-first-use nuclear policy and place greater emphasis on developing tactical and sub-strategic nuclear forces for coercion and possible use in a future Taiwan crisis.”
An estimated 11,000 troops are expected to march across Red Square behind more than 130 pieces of military hardware as a grand spectacle, as well as a flyover of the Il-80 command plane, known as the doomsday aircraft, which would carry Russia’s top brass in the event of a nuclear war. Mr Putin has long said a limited nuclear strike was a possibility and has not limited such an action to Ukraine.
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky said he didn’t believe Russia had any interest in ending the conflict and warned the scale of the damage and losses on a global scale increased with each passing day.