Putin ‘ready for long war’
Russian President Vladimir Putin is digging in for a long conflict in Ukraine and could resort to using nuclear weapons if he believes he is losing the war, a top United States intelligence official has warned.
The Director of National Intelligence, Avril Haines, told the US Senate armed services committee that the next phase of Russia’s invasion remained uncertain and was likely to become ‘‘more unpredictable and escalatory’’.
Putin could turn to ‘‘tactical’’ nuclear weapons – ones used over relatively short distances – if he perceived an existential threat to his regime or to Russia, Haines said.
‘‘We do think that [Putin’s perception of an existential threat] could be the case in the event that he perceives that he is losing the war in Ukraine, and that Nato in effect is either intervening or about to intervene.’’
Haines, who oversees the entire American intelligence community, including the CIA and National Security Agency, also told the committee that Putin was preparing for a prolonged conflict in Ukraine and still intended to grab territory beyond the eastern Donbas region.
US intelligence believes that Putin’s decision to concentrate Russian forces in Donbas is ‘‘only a temporary shift’’ after their failure to capture the capital Kyiv in the north. Russian forces still intended to win territory across the Black Sea coast, in part to secure water resources for Crimea, which Moscow seized in 2014, Haines said.
‘‘We ... see indications that the Russian military wants to extend the land bridge to Transnistria,’’ she said, referring to the Moscowbacked separatist region of Moldova, along Ukraine’s southwestern border.
However, she said the Russian force was not large enough or strong enough to capture and hold all that territory without a more general mobilisation of troops and resources from Russian society.
Putin ‘‘faces a mismatch between his ambitions and Russia’s current conventional military capabilities’’, she said. That ‘‘likely means the next few months could see us moving along a more unpredictable and potentially escalatory trajectory’’.
Scott Berrier, director of the
US Defence Intelligence Agency, told the same hearing that the Russians and the Ukrainians were ‘‘at a bit of a stalemate’’. This could change if Moscow formally declared war and ordered a general military mobilisation to boost the size of its forces.
■ Russian forces have used at least six types of cluster munitions in Ukraine, in attacks
that have caused hundreds of civilian casualties and violated international prohibitions on indiscriminate weapons, Human Rights Watch says in a new report.
Most incidents had taken place in Ukraine’s southern and eastern regions, including in populated areas, the New Yorkbased group said. Ukrainian forces had also used cluster
munitions ‘‘at least once’’ during the conflict.
Cluster munitions are banned under the 2008 Convention on Cluster Munitions, but neither Russia nor Ukraine signed the treaty. The bombs scatter dozens or hundreds of smaller bomblets indiscriminately over a wide area. Some fail to detonate, posing a threat to civilians.