By Stephen Bryen, Asia Times, 3/3/24

On July 25, 1943, Benito Mussolini, after being voted out of power by his own Grand Council, was called to a conference with King Vittorio Emanuele in the Villa Ada park at the special bunker known as the Villa Ada Savoia.

The King told Mussolini that the new Italian prime minister would be General Pietro Badoglio. Tired, unshaven and shaken, Mussolini walked out of the meeting only to be arrested by Carabinieri troops.

He would be held at different hiding places until he was transferred to the Hotel Campo Imperatore, Emperor’s Field Hotel (Albergo di Campo Imperatore) in the Apennine mountains.

Under Hitler’s personal orders, a German team made up of Nazi paratroopers (Fallschirmjäger) and a team drawn from the Waffen SS assembled in 10 gliders at Rome’s Pratica di Mare Air Base where they were towed to within striking distance of the hotel.

On September 12, 1943, the gliders carried an Italian general whose role was to convince Mussolini’s jailers not to fire on the Nazi rescue force. Four days before, the Italian government signed an armistice with the Allies, an event closely tracked (via communications intercepts) by Nazi intelligence. Allied forces had already taken Sicily and were lodged in southern Italy.

Hitler ordered his army to not only free Mussolini but also to take Rome, which they dutifully did. As this happened, the new government headed by Badoglio and the King escaped Rome and joined the allies at Bari, on the Adriatic in the south of the country.

The Germans established a military line of defense called the Gustav Line. Mussolini was flown out of Italy, first on a Storch light aircraft, and then transferred to more long-range aircraft that first took him to Vienna and, after a refresh, on to Berlin. Hitler would receive him and put him in charge of a rump Italian government called the Italian Social Republic (Repubblica Sociale Italiana, or RSI). 

In April 1945, as German defenses crumbled, Mussolini and his mistress Clara Petacci attempted to flee to Switzerland but they were captured by Italian communist partisans and summarily executed on April 28 near Lake Como. Their bodies were taken to a service station in Milan where both were hanged by their feet for public display.

This bit of World War II history could well be a model for US Pentagon plans to rescue Volodymyr Zelensky should his government in Kiev collapse. 

The US has launched a number of trial balloons and encouraged French leader Emmanuel Macron to propose the idea of sending NATO troops to Ukraine to somehow save the Ukrainians from the Russians.

This sort of thing would not have been discussed in polite circles until the failure of the Ukrainian counteroffensive and the collapse of the defense of Avdiivka. Now it is obvious that Russia has increased the tempo of its operations and is taking gobs of territory held by Ukraine’s army.  

It is also now clear that Ukraine has significant manpower problems and its attempt to use forceful means to corral potential recruits is causing unrest in the country, including in major cities such as Odesa, Kharkiv and Kiev.

The problem for Washington is the lack of political support for any NATO military operations in Ukraine. The revelations, especially in the European press, including a recording of German military officers discussing how they could blow up the massive Kerch Strait bridge with Taurus missiles and hide the operation, are undermining the German government’s already badly eroded credibility at home. A French “instant” poll, meanwhile, showed two-thirds opposed to sending troops to Ukraine.

US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, who recently emerged from a serious prostate operation to testify on Capitol Hill, argues that if Russia “wins” in Ukraine, then pretty soon after the Russians will attack NATO territory, suggesting that the first attacks might be against the Baltic states.

Austin knows there is no evidence supporting his argument. The same sort of claims, also coming from European leaders, are based on assumptions and assertions without any facts. Speaking on the occasion of his State of the Nation address in Moscow, Russian President Vladimir Putin said emphatically that Russia has no intention of attacking Europe.

Austin and the Pentagon are in a dilemma. Without a provocation of significant magnitude to justify a NATO intervention (another Gulf of Tonkin exercise of what was a manufactured casus belli), what can the US do to save Ukraine? How can it get away with an intervention that most wouldn’t object to in Europe or the United States?

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin listens during a Senate committee hearing on Capitol Hill earlier this year. Photo: Chad J McNeeley / Defense Department

The US cannot just send in troops to start fighting Russians. That would surely start a war in Europe. Putin has already put down a marker that if there was a war in Europe, Russia could use its “tactical” nuclear weapons.

While NATO has been playing chicken with the Russians for many months, urging Ukraine to use NATO-supplied weapons to attack Russian cities, for example, or attempting to take down the Kerch Strait bridge or other critical Russian infrastructure, the introduction of NATO frontline troops can’t be hidden behind a facade of non-intervention or plausible deniability.

On what basis could NATO troops get away with some sort of intervention without a Russian counterattack? The Nazi example of freeing Mussolini may be a model that, in a modern interpretation, might do the trick.

No one can say how long the Zelensky government can hold on in Kiev. With a steady Russian military advance, growing turmoil at home, the refusal to hold elections, the jailing of people opposed to Zelensky and a host of unpopular measures, Zelensky’s hold on power is entering the zone of desperation.

The Russians may see an opportunity for a power transition to leadership in Kiev inclined to make deals with Moscow. Zelensky probably can’t do that: he is too committed to expelling every last Russian from Ukrainian territory and demanding war crime trials, as he also insists that he will never deal with Putin in Russia. Zelensky’s security situation in Kiev could rapidly come under a terminal shadow.

In these circumstances, the Pentagon could rescue Zelensky and move him elsewhere, with Lviv (Lvov) being the most likely place, as it is far in the west and challenging for the Russians to reach if they wished to deal with Zelensky using military means. Rescued by NATO “forces”, the Russians might happily see Zelensky and his government go.

That would make the relocation possibly unobjectionable or at least not the worst outcome for the Russians. They could then deal with a more flexible replacement government.

In effect, just as Italy was temporarily divided (more or less) in half, with the Gustav line the demarcation until allied forces finally took Monte Cassino in May 1944, Ukraine might also be divided, although exactly how would depend on what remained of Ukraine’s army supporting Zelensky.

Should someone of the quality of former commander-in-chief Valerii Zaluzhny take over in Kiev, it could mean that Zelensky’s stay at Lviv would be brief and he would go into retirement elsewhere. From the perspective of NATO and the Pentagon, such a process would take some time, perhaps even a year, allowing President Joe Biden to hang on until the US elections in November.

There are not many good choices for NATO or Washington. Biden cannot afford another Afghanistan debacle but one is rapidly creeping in his direction thanks to Russian military victories and the crumbling of Ukraine’s defenses. Biden has the option of opening peace negotiations with Russia but Moscow may not be interested. There is a lot of water that has poured over the dam.

Of course, the military situation in Ukraine could stabilize and the Russians could decide to wait until after the US elections in November, but this seems unlikely now. The Russians are under their own domestic pressure to wrap up the “Special Military Operation” and there is no reason at present to believe that Putin and the Russian army will slow down or back off.

In this light, the Mussolini rescue at the Hotel Campo Imperiale model may be one of the few alternatives available.

By Katrina vanden Heuvel, The Nation, 3/5/24

As people flooded Moscow’s streets March 1 protesting Aleksey Navalny’s death in an Arctic prison camp, the outpouring became a display of dissent at a time of growing repression. As the Russian Orthodox service unfolded in the working-class Marino district, where Navalny and his family lived for decades, other Russian antiwar dissidents are confronting a new and expanding wave of repression and arrests.

Perhaps in anticipation of Presidential elections slated for March 17 (no cliffhanger), the growing strength of nationalistic “siloviki,” or part of an attack on the Russian Left movement, Russian authorities are handing out harsher sentences to those who appeal their charges. Prominent Russian activist Oleg Orlov, a veteran human rights campaigner and a leader of the Memorial human rights organization that jointly won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2022, was initially fined $1,630 for an article “discrediting the armed forces.” When Orlov appealed the ruling, a Moscow Court sentenced him last month to two and a half years for opposing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

And on February 13, a military court sentenced Boris Kagarlitsky, prominent sociologist, Marxist scholar and labor activist, to five years in prison for criticizing the war in Ukraine. This was after a Moscow court initially ordered him to only pay a $6,500 fine for “justifying terrorism,” charges which Kagarlitsky denied. Prosecutors appealed the lower court’s decision to fine him, calling it “excessively lenient.” Kagarlitsky, the founder and chief editor of the left-labor news organization Rabkor, and director of the Institute of Globalization and Social Movements (which was labeled a “foreign agent” in 2018), was first detained in July 2023 in connection with a since-deleted YouTube video about the 2022 Crimea bridge explosion.

Perhaps because Boris has been arrested before as a dissident—in 1982 during the Brezhnev years and in 1993 when he protested Yeltsin’s shelling of the country’s elected Parliament—he responded to the decision with calm and dignity: “We just need to live a little longer and survive this dark period for our country.”

I met Boris Kagarltsky in Moscow in 1982. He was a research assistant to the Marxist dissident historian Roy Medvedev, author of On Socialist Democracy and Let History Judge. My late husband, Stephen Cohen, who was living in Moscow on IREX’s academic exchange in 1976, met with Medvedev—who lived far from the city’s center—every few weeks to exchange ideas and historical documents. Our visit was unusual because of Boris’s presence, but even more so due to the presence of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s first wife, Natalya Reshetovskaya. She had asked Roy whom she might trust to take her typescript/manuscript about her life with Solzhenitsyn to the West for safekeeping. Steve had experience with taking out—and bringing in—books, from Russia to the West and vice versa, and he agreed to do so. (It may have been one reason why neither Steve nor I could get a visa to travel to Russia from 1982 to March 1985. On March 11, 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev came into office.)

Boris became a friend, introducing me to the Rabkor team, the Fellows at his Institute, sharing insights, history, and gossip about the media and political scene. He visited The Nation many times over the years and contributed articles. Boris is a person of integrity, great intelligence, and, yes, irony, humor, and creativity, qualities necessary to keep living and working in Putin’s Russia.

Boris has been a steadfast and productive dissident. He was editor of the samizdat journal Left Turn from 1978 to 1982, which led to his arrest for “anti-Soviet activities” in 1982. He was released in 1983. In 1988 he became coordinator of the Moscow People’s Front, and in 1990, he was elected to the Moscow City Soviet. He cofounded the Party of Labor. In 1993, he was arrested for his opposition to President Yeltsin during the September-October constitutional crisis—but was released quickly after international protests. Later that year, his job and the Moscow City Council were abolished under Yeltsin’s new Constitution.

Boris wrote in a letter to global supporters when he was arrested last year:

“This is not the first time in my life. I was locked up under Brezhnev, beaten and threatened with death under Yeltsin. And now it’s the second arrest under Putin. Those in power change, but the tradition of putting political opponents behind bars, alas, remains. But the willingness of many people to make sacrifices for their beliefs, for freedom, and social rights remain unchanged.

“I think that the current arrest can be considered a recognition of the political significance of my statements. Of course, I would have preferred to be recognized in a somewhat different form, but all in good time. In the 40-odd years since my first arrest, I have learned to be patient and to realize how fickle political fortune in Russia is….”

The experience of the past years…does not dispose much to optimism. But historical experience as a whole is much richer and gives much more grounds for positive expectations. Remember what Shakespeare wrote in Macbeth?

“The night is long that never finds the day.”

Boris’s daughter, responding to Navalny’s death, made this statement: “And for all of us, this is a special sign, especially for those of us who have relatives, friends, associates, in the hands of Putin’s regime, we are all not safe. Now when Boris is behind bars, it is especially important…to show even more solidarity around Boris, around his case and around other political prisoners.”

Last week, in a post on Telegram, Boris said he was “in a great mood as always” and that he plans to continue collecting materials for new books, “including descriptions of prison life.”

Last year, galvanized by Boris’s detention, a “Free Boris” movement arose globally and, perhaps more importantly, across Russian cities and towns. Spontaneous demonstrations were held; online protests and coordinated international actions commemorated Boris’s birthday in August. Thousands of signatures were collected from prominent intellectuals, activists, and political figures. Brazilian President Lula da Silva criticized Boris’s detention, as did leaders in other BRICs countries whom Putin counts as allies.

Significantly, when Boris’s first arrest occurred last year two pro-Kremlin figures, RT’s Margarita Simonian and analyst Sergei Markov, were quoted in The Washington Post stating what a mistake it was.

When Boris was released on December 13, 2023, it was a demonstration that international pressure and solidarity works.

According to the Moscow court’s decision, Boris will be sent to pretrial detention center No. 12 of the Federal Penitentiary Service of Russia in Moscow. In Moscow, this center is known as one of Russia’s harshest lockups—word is that he is being held in a cell with 15 other men.

For information on how to show solidarity and support, use Patreon or Busti. Visit freeboris.info.

By Brandan P. Buck, Responsible Statecraft, 2/16/24

President Trump’s latest comments criticizing NATO and the ensuing media reaction obscure the fact that Americans have long held dissenting opinions on the U.S. relationship to European security.

As has happened all too often throughout the Trump era, the heat of escalating rhetoric on the part of the 45th President and his committed adversaries has distracted from the more substantive foreign policy debate.

Today, the U.S-European security relationship has never been more sacrosanct, at least in the mind’s eye of the national security establishment and their allies in the mainstream press. Yet historically, the range of debate and criticism of this ostensibly sacred pact has been far more open than nostalgia or the modern commentariat may suggest.

Throughout American involvement in NATO, the nation’s national security elites, members of Congress, commentators, and, yes, presidents, too, have all challenged the contours of commitment to the organization and its members at one time or another. Furthermore, they did so when Western countries faced a significantly larger Soviet military deployed deep into the heart of Central Europe.

During the early Cold War, the nature of American involvement in the alliance and its commitment to staff Europe with a permanent garrison were not seen as beyond question, even by American officials in positions of authority. In fact, American Cold War architects sold an American garrison in Europe as a temporary measure meant to shore up allies still licking their wounds from the Second World War. In congressional testimony concerning the ratification of the NATO treaty, Sen. Bourke B. Hickenlooper (R-Iowa) pressed Secretary of State Dean Acheson on if he thought the treaty meant that the U.S. would leave “substantial numbers of troops over there.” An indignant Acheson responded, “[t]he answer to that question, Senator, is a clear and absolute ‘No.'”

Even as Acheson’s assurances to Congress proved hollow, NATO’s first commander, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, while supportive of NATO’s legal mechanisms of collective security, believed that America’s garrison and material aid were temporary. Eisenhower warned that if “in 10 years, all American troops stationed in Europe for national defense purposes have not been returned to the United States, then this whole project will have failed.”

Later as president, Eisenhower, despite solidifying the Cold War policies of his predecessor and eschewing the Republican Party’s non-interventionism, continued to press behind the scenes for a greater degree of burden-sharing on the part of NATO’s European members, quietly fuming that they were “making a sucker out of Uncle Sam.” Several of his successors shared Eisenhower’s sentiments, from Kennedy and Johnson to George W. Bush.

In Congress, the extent of American military involvement remained a persistent issue for the Republican Right. Be they principled noninterventionists or Asia First unilateralists, the extent of American troop presence in Europe remained a contested issue. Retired Army officer Bonner Fellers, writing in a July 1949 issue of Human Events, a conservative magazine, summed up the widely agreed-upon position of these dissenters. While Fellers believed that the NATO treaty had “enormous psychological value,” as it served as a “symbol of unity” and deterrence, he did not think that that should translate into a massive and permanent military garrison in Western Europe.

Fellers revisited the issue two years later in an article for Human Events, which was read into the Congressional Record. Rather than see the American European garrison as a deterrent, Fellers asserted that it could be viewed as a provocation and argued that the “presence of our forces on the Rhine gives Stalin a visible symbol, a unifying agent which tends to enlist the support of all Russians behind the Kremlin.”

It is important to note that Fellers was hardly a dove. Instead, he was a committed anti-communist who loathed the Soviet Union and supported a nuclear deterrence on the cheap, a Fortress America 2.0. Yet, he, like many within the Republican Right, did not allow their ideological priors to automatically dictate a desire for endless security commitments to Western Europe.

On Capitol Hill, Fellers’s views were common and supported by conservative Republicans who saw an American military garrison as an expensive handout to allies whose rebuilt economies could shoulder their defense, all while providing little deterrent effect. In 1953, speaking on the issue of America’s military mission in Europe, Rep. Lawrence H. Smith (R-Wis.) asked rhetorically, “[w]here is the threat of military aggression?”

According to Smith, after returning from a fact-finding mission in Europe, his subcommittee on Europe reported that “there was no fear of communism in the hearts and the minds of the people there.” The sentiments espoused by Fellers and Smith persisted in pockets of the Republican Right throughout the early Cold War despite the ideological demands of the era.

During the final decades of the Cold War, opposition to the presence of an American military garrison in Western Europe and the continuation of military aid emanated primarily from the left wing of the Democratic Party as a new generation of Democrats took office and sought to rein military spending and commitments. On Capitol Hill, Democrats attempted to force American troop level cuts in Europe in the House in 1988, and the Senate in 1990.

With the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, the horseshoe of opposition to maintaining the status quo thickened as a body of conservative Republicans joined progressive Democrats in opposing NATO expansion, first in 1994 and then in 1999. While both votes failed, and the United States maintained a sizeable garrison in Europe, the opposition to outdated Cold War paradigms remained and flowed freely, untainted by the scurrilous charge of echoing “Putin talking points.”

Indeed, even as late as November 2016, President Obama mirrored the sentiments of then President-elect Donald Trump in stating that “[i]f Greece can meet this NATO commitment, all our NATO allies should be able to do so.”

This latest fervor has, as all too often now, completely ignored these historical debates around American foreign policy commitments, creating in their passions an ahistorical sense of policy inevitability. If Americans past and present, from presidents on down, could question the contours of American security commitments and did so in far more perilous times, then so should we.

By James Carden, ACURA, 2/13/24

During Mr. Obama’s second term in office (2013-2017), it had become clear that the terms of the public policy debate were undergoing a radical and worrying transformation. In the space of a very short time, certain ideas and policy proposals were being ruled as out of bounds not on the grounds that they were unwise, impractical, or inefficient, but on the grounds that they were products of “disinformation” campaigns on the part of foreign intelligence agencies.

To take one example: Those few who publicly expressed reservations with regard to Mr. Obama’s policy toward Russia and Ukraine found themselves branded not as merely unwise or wrongheaded but as nefarious tools of a foreign disinformation campaign.

The late Obama years witnessed a proliferation of OSNIT (open-source intelligence) outfits helmed by inane YouTube sleuths like Eliot Higgins, a figure with little in the way of formal education and absolutely zero experience in intelligence gathering who somehow became a public figure virtually overnight (Gosh, how did that happen?).

It can hardly be a coincidence that Bellingcat and its imitators sprung up at exactly the same moment that the US foreign policy establishment embarked upon a new and more dangerous cold war (one that has both Russia and China as its target).

Under Obama, the division of the world between “democracies and authoritarian regimes” was made the centerpiece of US foreign policy, animated by a paranoia not seen in this country since the late 1940s and early 1950s. And stoking the paranoia among both the chattering classes and the population at large necessitated the formation of a new information apparatus, and this, in turn, required a revision of a Cold War era law, the Smith-Mundt Act of 1948 which heretofore had prohibited the US government from propagandizing its own citizens at taxpayer expense.

Soon after the Smith-Mundt “reform” was passed, the so-called Global Engagement Center was stood up under the auspices of the US Department of State. The Center, now led by former Clinton administration flack Jamie Rubin (husband of the reliably pro-interventionist CNN correspondent Christiane Amanpour), provides grants to “disinformation” outfits such as NewsGuard, which is currently facing a defamation lawsuit filed by Consortium News, the news outlet founded by legendary Iran-Contra reporter Robert Parry.

That aside, it must be admitted that the efforts of the “disinformation” complex have perhaps succeeded beyond the wildest wishes of those who set it in place. The work product of these outfits has been “weaponized” (a favorite term of art of the complex, and a word that has become unfortunately ubiquitous over the past decade thanks to it) to marginalize and stigmatize dissent. By turns vicious and unscrupulous, the tactics of the “disinformation” complex have, over the years, been co-opted by legacy media outlets like the Washington Post and the New York Times. And, as a consequence, policy alternatives are now routinely ruled out on grounds not that they are merely mistaken but on grounds they are treasonous, that they are Manchurian policies that ought to be dismissed out of hand, lest they play into the enemy’s hands.

It has always been the case that the American president is, due to his reliance on the intelligence fed to him by his circle of advisers, in some respects a prisoner of the national security apparatus which he ostensibly oversees. In a 1971 essay titled “The National Security Managers and the National Interest,” Richard Barnet, a founder of the Institute for Policy Studies observed that “National Security Managers exercise their power chiefly by filtering the information that reaches the President and by interpreting the outside world for him.” Picking up on Barnet’s theme, the philosopher Hannah Arendt further observed that “The President, one is tempted to argue, allegedly the most powerful man in the most powerful country, is the only person in this country whose range of choices can be predetermined.” That is, more or less, the role of the Deputies Committee of the National Security Council whose remit is to, among other things, set the agenda and the range of policy options that will be presented by the NSC principals to the Commander-in-Chief.

I would argue that today the chief executive’s choices are even further circumscribed by the existence of the public-private “disinformation” complex which further stacks the deck in favor of the national security state which acts as a buffer to facts, common sense and alternatives by rendering it politically even more difficult (if not impossible) for a president to challenge the prerogatives of the system.

After all, it is one thing to buck your national security advisors, it is quite another to buck your national security advisors, Congress, The New York Times, The Washington Post, large segments of the public and the entirety of official Washington. Precious few US presidents have ever had the courage to do the former – what, do you suppose, is the likelihood of any finding it within themselves to do the latter?

As such, the president is the “disinformation” complex’s most valuable hostage.

By MK Bhadrakumar, Indian Punchline, 3/4/24

The spectre of Armageddon has been raised often enough during the 2-year old war in Ukraine that the reference to it in Russian President Vladimir Putin’s state of the union address on Thursday had a familiar ring about it. Therein lies the risk of misjudgement on the part of the western audience that Putin was only “crying wolf”. 

Three things must be noted at the outset. First, Putin has been explicit and direct. He is giving advance notice that he is obliged to respond with nuclear capability if the Russian statehood is threatened. Eschewing innuendos or dark hints, Putin actually made a sombre declaration of epochal significance.

Second, Putin was addressing the Federal Assembly in front of the crème de la crème of the Russian elite and took the entire nation into confidence that the country may be pushed into a nuclear war for its self-preservation.

Third, a specific context is sailing into view precipitated by foolhardy, impetuous western statesmen who are desperate to stave off an impending defeat in the war, which they began in the first instance, with the stated intention to destroy Russia’s economy, create social and political instability that would lead to a regime change in the Kremlin.

In reality, the US Secretary Lloyd Austin’s prognosis on Thursday at a Congressional hearing in Washington that “NATO will be in a fight with Russia” if Ukraine was defeated is the manifestation of a predicament that the Biden Administration faces after having led Europe to the brink of an abysmal defeat in Ukraine engendering grave uncertainties regarding its economic recovery and de-industrialisation due to the blowback of sanctions against Russia.

Plainly put, what Austin meant was that if Ukraine loses, NATO will have to go against Russia, as otherwise the future credibility of the western alliance system will be in jeopardy. It’s a call to Europe to rally for a continental war.

What French President Emmanuel Macron stated earlier last week on Monday was also an articulation of that same mindset, when he caused a storm by hinting that sending ground troops to help Kyiv was a possibility.

To quote Macron, “There is no consensus today to send ground troops officially but … nothing is ruled out. We will do whatever it takes to ensure that Russia cannot win this war. The defeat of Russia is indispensable to the security and stability of Europe.”

Macron was speaking after a summit of 20 European countries in Paris where a “restricted document” under discussion had implied “that a number of NATO and EU member states were considering sending troops to Ukraine on a bilateral basis,” according to Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico.

Fico said the document “sends shivers down your spine,” as it implied that “a number of NATO and EU member states are considering sending troops to Ukraine on a bilateral basis.”

Fico’s disclosure would not have come as surprise for Moscow, which has now put on the public domain the transcript of a confidential conversation between two German generals back on February 19 discussing the scenario of a potential attack on the Crimean Bridge with Taurus missiles and possible combat deployment by Berlin in Ukraine belying all public denials by Chancellor Olaf Scholz.

Aptly enough, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov called the transcript “a screaming revelation.’‘ Interestingly, the transcript reveals that American and British servicemen are already deployed in Ukraine — something Moscow has been alleging for months — and such other details too. 

This is a moment of truth for Russia. After learning to live with the steady upgrade of western weaponry supplied to Ukraine, which now includes Patriot missiles and F-16 fighter jets, after having signalled vainly that any attack on Crimea or any attack on Russian territory would be regarded as a red line; after gingerly sidestepping the US-UK participation in operations to bring the war home to Russian territory — Macron’s belligerent statement last week has been the proverbial last straw for the Kremlin. It envisages western combat deployment to fight and kill Russian soldiers and conquer territories on behalf of Kiev.

At the speech on Thursday, which was almost entirely devoted to a hugely ambitious and forward-looking road map to address social and economic issues under the new normalcy Russia has achieved even under conditions of western sanctions, Putin held out a warning to the entire West by placing nuclear weapons on the table.

Putin underscored that any (further) crossing of the unwritten ground rules will be unacceptable — that while the US and its NATO allies provide military assistance to Ukraine but do not attack Russia’s soil and do not directly engage in combat, Russia would confine itself to using conventional weapons.

Quintessentially, the thrust of Putin’s remarks lies in his refusal to accept a fate for Russia in existential terms arranged by the West. The thinking behind it is not hard to comprehend. Simply put, Russia will not allow any attempt by the US and its allies to reshape the ground situation by impacting the front lines with NATO military personnel backed by advanced weaponry and satellite capabilities.

Putin has put the ball firmly in the Western court to decide whether the NATO will risk a nuclear confrontation, which of course is not Russia’s choice.

The context in which all this is unfolding has been pithily framed by the leader of a NATO country, Hungary’s prime minister Viktor Orban, while addressing a forum of top diplomats in Antalya in the Turkish Riviera in the weekend when he stressed that “Europeans, along with the Ukrainians are losing the war and have no idea of how to find a way out of this situation.”

Orban said, “We, Europeans, are now in a difficult position,” adding that European countries took the conflict in Ukraine “as their own war” and realise belatedly that time is not on Ukraine’s side. “Time is on Russia’s side. That is why it is necessary to stop hostilities immediately.”

As he put it, “If you think that this is your war, but the enemy is stronger than you and has advantages on the battlefield, in this case, you are in the losers’ camp and it will not be an easy task to find a way out of this situation. Now, we Europeans, along with the Ukrainians, are losing the war and have no idea of how to find a way out of this situation, a way out of this conflict. This is a very serious problem.”

This is the crux of the matter. In the circumstances, the bottom line is that it will be catastrophic speciousness on the part of the western leadership and public opinion not to grasp the full import of Putin’s stark warning that Moscow means what it has been saying, namely, that it will regard any western combat deployment in Ukraine by NATO countries as an act of war.

To be sure, if Russia faces the risk of military defeat in Ukraine at the hands of NATO forces on combat deployment and Donbass and Novorossiya regions are at risk of being subjugated once again, that would threaten the stability and integrity of Russian statehood — and challenge the legitimacy of the Kremlin leadership itself — wherein the question of using nuclear weapons may become more open.

To drive home the point, Putin glanced through the Russian inventory that buttresses its nuclear superiority today, which the US cannot possibly match. And he further de-classified some top-secret information: “Efforts to develop several other new weapons systems continue, and we are expecting to hear even more about the achievements of our researchers and weapons manufacturers.”