By Francine Uenuma, Smithsonian Magazine, 4/27/22

In November 1983, during a particularly tense period in the Cold War, Soviet observers spotted planes carrying what appeared to be warheads taxiing out of their NATO hangars. Shortly after, command centers for the NATO military alliance exchanged a flurry of communication, and, after receiving reports that their Soviet adversaries had used chemical weapons, the United States decided to intensify readiness to DEFCON 1—the highest of the nuclear threat categories, surpassing the DEFCON 2 alert declared at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis two decades prior. Concerned about a preemptive strike, Soviet forces prepared their nuclear weapons for launch.

There was just one problem. None of the NATO escalation was real—at least, not in the minds of the Western forces participating in the Able Archer 83 war game.

A variation of an annual military training exercise, the scenario started with a change in Soviet leadership, heightened proxy rivalries and the Soviets’ invasion of several European countries. Lasting five days, it culminated in NATO resorting to the use of nuclear weapons. Soviet intelligence watched the event with special interest, suspicious that the U.S. might carry out a nuclear strike under the guise of a drill. The realism of Able Archer was ironically effective: It was designed to simulate the start of a nuclear war, and many argue that it almost did.

“In response to this exercise, the Soviets readied their forces, including their nuclear forces, in a way that scared NATO decision makers eventually all the way up to President [Ronald] Reagan,” says Nate Jones, author of Able Archer 83: The Secret History of the NATO Exercise That Almost Triggered Nuclear War and a senior fellow at the National Security Archive.

Perhaps most concerning is that the danger was largely unknown and overlooked, both during the exercise and throughout that precarious year, when changes in leadership and an acceleration in the nuclear arms race ratcheted up tensions between the two superpowers. A since-declassified 1990 report by the President’s Foreign Intelligence Review Board (PFIAB) concluded, “In 1983 we may have inadvertently placed our relations with the Soviet Union on a hair trigger.”

Almost 40 years later, the Russian invasion of Ukraine has evoked comparisons with the Cold War, particularly when it comes to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s vaguely worded threats. At the onset of the war, Putin warned of “consequences you have never seen”—a declaration interpreted in some quarters as a nod to his country’s nuclear capabilities. More recently, U.S. President Joe Biden’s announcement of new weapons for Ukraine elicited an admonition from Moscow about “unpredictable consequences.” Biden has declined to send American troops and cautioned that “direct confrontation between NATO and Russia is World War III.”

“The Russians have made some allusions not rising to the level of explicit threats, but it’s very, very strongly implied,” says Edward Geist, a policy researcher at the RAND Corporation, a nonprofit global policy think tank. Though he doesn’t see a commensurate change in Russia’s actions or positioning of nuclear assets, Geist interprets the message being sent to NATO as “you don’t want to actually get directly involved in this because that could escalate to nuclear war. … It’s not worth the risk, so you should stay out and let us do what we want in Ukraine.”

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By the fall of 1983, the U.S. and the Soviet Union had reached a point of mutually assured misunderstanding. Relations between the two nations were at a particularly low ebb in the decades-long Cold War, which had emerged out of the ashes of World War II. The elimination of a common enemy—Nazi Germany—allowed the victors to shift their focus to each other as rivals. Following America’s use of an atomic weapon against Japan in 1945 and the Soviet Union’s own nuclear test in 1949, the arms race began in full effect.

NATO, a security alliance established between the U.S. and Western European nations in 1949, was mirrored by the Warsaw Pact, a defense treaty signed by the Soviet Union and members of its Eastern Bloc. Two years after the Warsaw Pact’s formation in 1955, the Soviets launched the world’s first artificial satellite, Sputnik I, placing space on the playing field even as the rivalry continued to take shape on Earth through proxy wars in Asia. In the 1970s, a mood of détente prevailed as President Richard Nixon and Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev reached a series of agreements aimed at arms control.

Early in the next decade, with new leadership on both sides, détente had evaporated. After taking office in 1981, Reagan matched his campaign rhetoric by initiating a doubling of the defense budget. Soviet leader Yuri Andropov, who assumed power the following year, came to the job after heading the KGB, where he initiated Operation RYaN, whose name is an acronym describing a sudden nuclear attack. “The main objective of our intelligence service is not to miss the military preparations of the enemy … for a nuclear strike,” Andropov said in 1981.

Operation RYaN lent itself to confirmation bias, with many routine activities—such as official visits or blood drives—feeding fears of war. And when it came to looking for signs of imminent attack, Able Archer fit the bill.

On the American side, defense and intelligence officials “shared the long-held view that ‘the U.S. doesn’t do Pearl Harbors,’” writes historian Taylor Downing in 1983: Reagan, Andropov and a World on the Brink. The Americans therefore assumed the Soviets knew they had no intention of launching a preemptive nuclear attack. Early intelligence estimates after Able Archer dismissed apparent Soviet fears as a ploy to slow American defense buildup. As the PFIAB report noted, analysts “identified signs of emotional and paranoid Soviet behavior” yet saw “motives for trying to cleverly manipulate Western perceptions.”

It was a vicious circle. The Soviets refused to believe the Americans were bluffing; the Americans, meanwhile, suspected the Soviets were bluffing about not thinking the Americans were bluffing.

A series of inflammatory events that year paved the way for the fraught moments of Able Archer. In a March speech to the National Association of Evangelicals, Reagan characterized the Soviet Union as an “evil empire” and decried those “who would place the United States in a position of military and moral inferiority.”

Later that month, the president announced plans for the Strategic Defense Initiative (popularly dubbed “Star Wars”), which aimed to intercept incoming nuclear missiles from space. Reagan viewed it purely as a defensive measure, but the Soviet Union saw a shield that would enable the U.S. to take offensive action by reducing its fear of retaliation. Such protection would undermine the notion of mutually assured destruction, which was seen as a grim deterrent for starting a nuclear war.

American military planes and ships pressed at Soviet borders in so-called PSYOPS, or psychological operations—shows of force that further aggravated the Soviets. In the spring of 1983, the looming presence of these American warcraft prompted Andropov to adopt a policy of “shoot to kill” at any similar incursion.

On the night of September 1, the civilian airliner Korean Airlines 007 went off course on its flight from Anchorage to Seoul. The Soviets, mistaking the plane for a military aircraft, shot it down, killing all 269 people on board. Reagan called it a “massacre.”

Perhaps most alarming to the Soviets was NATO’s deployment of new intermediate-range ballistic and cruise missiles that could strike the U.S.S.R.—and Moscow itself—faster than previously possible. Though this operation took place in response to the Soviets’ development of similarly potent missiles in the late 1970s, Soviet leaders still saw the move as menacing. Just weeks before Able Archer, Soviet Defense Minister Dmitry Ustinov characterized the NATO missiles “as means for a first strike, the ‘decapitation strike,’” in a meeting with fellow Warsaw Pact officials, according to documents held by the National Security Archive. The threat posed by the missiles increased the argument for a launch on warning strategy, which made speed—and therefore a decrease in decision-making time—the linchpin of defense.

In June, during a private meeting with a former American emissary to Moscow, Andropov expressed fears of a conflagration far worse than the Second World War, in which the two nations had been allies. “This war may perhaps not occur through evil intent,” he said, “but could happen through miscalculation.”

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Able Archer 83 was part of a constellation of recurring NATO exercises. But some elements—including the dummy warheads, the DEFCON status changes and communications patterns (including periods of speculation-inducing radio silence)—were unique to that year. Managed out of NATO’s headquarters in Brussels and involving components across Western Europe, the training simulated coordination across the alliance’s commands in response to aggression by the Warsaw Pact.

As the Able Archer scenario intensified, the head of the Soviet air forces ordered a state of readiness that “included preparations for immediate use of nuclear weapons,” according to later-declassified sources referenced in a memorandum by Lieutenant General Leonard Perroots, then the Air Force’s assistant chief of staff for intelligence in Europe. During the exercise, analysts concluded that at least one squadron “was loading a munitions configuration that they had never actually loaded before.” Perroots’ concerns were echoed by the PFIAB, which called the reaction of Soviet intelligence, including 36 surveillance flights, “unprecedented.”

At the time, Perroots chose to continue monitoring development and not escalate in kind. (His prudent inaction has drawn comparisons to Soviet Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov, who correctly interpreted a false alarm of nuclear attack that September.) In his memorandum, Perroots outlined a “potentially disastrous situation,” one that he found even more alarming after Oleg Gordievsky, a high-level KGB officer who served as a double agent for the British, revealed that the Soviet security agency believed Able Archer would serve as an ideal “cover” for an attack. After the exercise, with the benefit of hindsight, the PFIAB report called Perroots’ patience a “fortuitous, if ill-informed, decision.”

“We now know how nervous the [Soviet] leadership became, … [putting] the entire [state] arsenal with its 11,000 warheads on to maximum combat alert,” writes Downing in his book. He describes a seriously ill Andropov conferring with military leaders at a clinic outside of Moscow as the exercise proceeded apace, capturing the essence of the problem that was at the crux of Able Archer and the “war scare” as a whole: “It was impossible for satellites to pick up any insight into the state of paranoia in the Soviet leadership.”

Though these men never publicly mentioned Able Archer by name, glimpses into their mindsets at the time are available. Days after Able Archer concluded, defense minister Ustinov wrote in the state-run Pravda newspaper that NATO’s exercises “are becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish from a real deployment of armed forces for aggression.”

Blind spots were plentiful on both sides. Robert Gates, then the CIA’s deputy director for intelligence, told Downing that “we may have been at the brink of nuclear war and not even known it.” In retrospect, the “miscalculation” that Andropov had feared five months earlier seemed plausible.

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Scholars still debate exactly how dangerous this juncture was. Simon Miles of Duke University has argued that the retrospective analysis of Able Archer is overblown, as evidenced by Soviet actions that fell short of their nuclear capabilities. Contemporary extrapolations based on what the Soviets did or did not do will always be impossible to fully prove or disprove.

The Soviets refused to believe the Americans were bluffing; the Americans, meanwhile, suspected the Soviets were bluffing about not thinking the Americans were bluffing.

Jones, who is also the Freedom of Information Act director for the Washington Post, notes that some information about the exercise remains inaccessible to the public; even portions of the 1990 PFIAB report are redacted. “I would say to the skeptics that the more that’s declassified, the more scary it looks,” he adds.

The precarious decline of U.S.-Soviet relations throughout those months left an impression on Reagan. Presented with a summary of recent Soviet actions that pointed to broader war preparations—including the bolstering of domestic civil defenses, the pattern of troop movements within the country and shifts from commercial to military use—the president called them “really scary.”

Reagan’s November 18, 1983, diary entry reflects a realization that these fears were genuine: “I feel the Soviets are so defense minded, so paranoid about being attacked that without in any way being soft on them we ought to tell then no one here has any intention of doing anything like that. What the h—l have they got that anyone would want.”

The ensuing years brought a reduction in tensions that led to the end of the Cold War. The shift in Reagan’s approach was complemented by the ascension of Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985. Despite leading on opposite sides of the ideological spectrum, the two men found avenues for cooperation in the later 1980s.

The Cold War is now three decades in the rearview mirror, and the invasion of Ukraine is a far cry from a fictional exercise. But while history doesn’t necessarily repeat itself, it does mutate—and once again, nuclear-tinged rhetoric is making headlines.

Geist considers the nuclear threat low risk at present but acknowledges that the mere specter of it still carries great influence. “It’s framing what is considered possible for basically all … foreign governments, including our own,” he says. “The idea of direct intervention would be much more seriously considered against a non-nuclear power.”

Common to this or any other chapter of the post-World War II nuclear world is the fact that no nuclear threat, whether vague or explicit, comes without a degree of risk. As Jones point out, “The danger of brinksmanship”—a foreign policy practice that pushes parties to the edge of confrontation—“is it’s easier than we think for one side to fall into the brink.”

By Ian Proud, Substack, 10/22/25

President Trump’s latest about face on dialogue with Russia doesn’t change the fundamental predicament Europe finds itself in: unable to inflict a strategic defeat on Russia but unwilling to face the political consequences of ending the war in Ukraine.

The Budapest Summit between Trump and Putin is now off, it seems. European leaders and Zelensky have clearly sold the US President on the idea of entering a ceasefire along the current line of contact. Yet, caught between a rock and a hard place, European leaders continue to deny the obvious realities of the dire situation in Ukraine, which will only worsen over time. I see no evidence of any willingness to change course, despite the obvious political hazard they face and the increasingly grim forecast for Europe and for Ukraine should they continue to push an unwinnable war.

The war in Ukraine is now entirely dependent on the ability of European states to pay for it at a cost of at least $50bn per year, on the basis of Ukraine’s latest budget estimate for the 2026 fiscal year. Ukraine itself is bankrupt and has no access to other sources of external capital, beyond that provided by the governments sponsoring the ongoing war.

That then brings the conversation back to the creation of a so-called ‘reconstruction loan’ underwritten by $140bn of the Russian foreign exchange assets currently frozen in Belgium. The term ‘reconstruction loan’ is itself disingenuous, on the basis that any expropriated Russian assets would not be used for reconstruction, but rather to fund the Ukrainian war effort. Indeed. Chancellor Merz of Germany recently suggested that the fund could allow Ukraine to keep fighting for another three years.

The most likely scenario, in the terrible eventuality that war in Ukraine did continue for another three years is that the Russian armed forces would almost certainly swallow up the whole of the Donbass region – comprising Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts. This – Ukraine’s departure from the Donbas – appears to be the basis of President Putin’s conditions for ending the war now, together with a Ukrainian declaration of neutrality and giving up any NATO aspirations. More likely, the Russian Armed forces might also capture additional swathes of land in Zaporizhia and Kherson oblasts, and also in Dnipropetrovsk, where they have made recent incursions.

So, there is a strong likelihood, at the currently slow pace of the war effort in which Russia claims small pieces of land on a weekly basis, that three years from now Ukraine would have to settle for a peace that was even more disadvantageous to it than that which is available now, having lost more land, together with potentially hundreds of thousands of troops killed or injured.

Logically, European policymakers would be able to look into the future to see this grim predicament with clear eyes and encourage Zelensky to settle for peace now.

But European policy is driven by two key considerations. Firstly, an emotional belief that an extended war might so weaken Russia that President Putin was forced to settle on unfavourable terms. The idea of a strategic defeat of Russia – which is often spoken by European politicians – however, doesn’t bear serious scrutiny.

Russia doesn’t face the same considerable social and financial challenges that Ukraine faces. Its population is much larger and a wider conscription of men into the Armed forces has not been needed – Russia can recruit sufficient new soldiers to fight and, indeed, has increased the size of its army since 2022. Ukraine continues to resort to forced mobilisation of men over the age of 25, often using extreme tactics that involve busifying young men against their will from the streets.

Critically, Russia could likely continue to prosecute the war on the current slow tempo for an extended period of time without the need for a wider mobilisation of young men, which may prove politically unpopular for President Putin domestically. Yet, the longer the war continues, Ukraine will come under increasing pressure, including from western allies, to deepen its mobilisation to capture young men below the age of 25 to shore up its heavily depleted armed forces on the front line.

There has been considerable resistance to this so far within Ukraine. Mobilising young men above the age of 22 would prove unpopular for President Zelensky but it would also worsen Ukraine’s already catastrophic demographic challenge: 40% of the working age population has already been lost, either through migration or through death on the front line and that number will continue to go south, the longer the war carries on.

Russia’s financial position is considerably stronger than Ukraine’s. It has very low levels of debt at around 15% of GDP and maintains a healthy current account surplus, despite a narrowing of the balance in the second quarter of 2025. Even if Europe expropriates its frozen assets, Russia still has a generous and growing stock of foreign exchange reserves to draw upon, which recently topped $700bn for the first time.

Russia’s military industrial complex continues to outperform western suppliers in the production of military equipment and munitions. In the currently unlikely event that Russia started to fall into the red in terms of its trade – what commentators in the west refer to as destroying Russia’s war economy – it would still have considerable scope to borrow from non-western lenders, given the strength of its links with the developing world, aided by the emergence of BRICS.

Ukraine is functionally bankrupt because it is unable to borrow from western capital markets, on account of its decision to pause all debt payments. With debt expected to reach 110% in 2025, even before consideration of any loan backed by frozen Russian assets, it depends entirely on handouts from the west. Ukraine’s trade balance has continued to worsen throughout the war, reinforcing its dependence on capital injections from the west to keep its foreign exchange reserves in the black.

So while the determination of Ukraine to fight is unquestionable, the emotional belief in the west that this will overcome the enormous social and economic challenges the country faces in an extended attritional war with Russia is wildly misplaced.

So, let’s look at the rational explanation for Europe’s continued willingness to prolong the fight in Ukraine. The uncomfortable truth is that Europe’s political leaders have boxed themselves into this position because of a hard boiled determination not to concede to Russia’s demands in any peace negotiations. Indeed, there is a steadfast and immovable objection to talking to Russia at all, which has been growing since 2014.

However, across much of Europe, the political arithmetic is turning against the pro-war establishment with nationalist, anti-war parties gaining ground in Central Europe, Germany, France, Britain and even in Poland. And despite so far fruitless overtures made by President Trump towards negotiation with President Putin, Trumpophobia provides another brake on the European political establishment shifting its position.

So, changing course now and entering into direct negotiations with Russia would have potentially catastrophic consequences, politically, for European leaders, which they must surely be aware of. A full 180 degree change in diplomatic course by Europe would require an acceptance that the war against Russia was unwinnable, and that Russia’s underlying concerns – namely Ukrainian neutrality – would finally have to be accepted as a political reality.

On this basis, European politicians would face the prospect of explaining to their increasingly sceptical voters that their strategy of defeating Russia had failed, having spent four years of war saying at all times that it would eventually succeed. And that would lead potentially to internationalist governments falling across Europe starting in two years when Poland and France will again go to the polls, and in 2029 when the British and German governments will face the voters.

There are deeper issues too. An end of war would accelerate the process of admitting Ukraine into the European Union with potentially disastrous consequences for the whole financial basis of Europe. The European Commission will face the prospect of accepting that a two-tier Europe is inevitable, admitting Ukraine as a member without the financial benefits received by existing member states; for probably understandable reasons, this would cause widespread resentment within Ukraine itself, having sacrificed so much blood to become European, precipitating widespread internal dissent and possibly conflict in a disgruntled country with an army of almost one million. Alternatively, the European Commission would need to redraw its budget and face huge resistance from existing Member States, who would lose billions of Euros each year in subsidies to Ukraine. And the truth is that it will in all likelihood be unable to do so.

Caught between hoping for a strategic defeat of Russia which any rational observer can see is unlikely, and accepting the failure of their policy, causing a widespread loss of power and huge economic and political turmoil, Europe’s leaders are choosing to keep calm and carry on. If they had any sense, the likes of Von der Leyen, Merz, Starmer or Macron would change tack and pin their hopes on explaining away their failure before the political tide in Europe evicts them all from power. But I see no signs of them having the political acumen to do that. So we will continue to sit and wait, while storm clouds grow ever darker over Europe.

Euronews, 10/29/25

Three days after announcing a test of the nuclear-powered Burevestnik missile, Moscow said on Wednesday it also tested Poseidon, a nuclear-capable underwater drone. The second nuclear weapon test in just a week comes as the talks with the US stalled over Moscow’s reluctance to ceasefire in Ukraine.

Russia has conducted a successful test of a new nuclear-powered and nuclear-capable underwater drone, known as Poseidon, President Vladimir Putin announced on Wednesday.

Describing it as a new weapon “which cannot be intercepted,” Putin said the drone has already been dubbed a “doomsday machine”.

Speaking at a Moscow hospital where he met the soldiers wounded in Russia’s war against Ukraine, Putin said the Poseidon drone was tried while running on nuclear power for the first time on Tuesday. He also described it as having “unmatched in speed and depth”.

The Russian president said the nuclear reactor that powers the Poseidon is “100 times smaller” than those on submarines, and the power of its nuclear warhead is “significantly higher than that of our most advanced Sarmat intercontinental ballistic missile.”

“For the first time, we managed not only to launch it with a launch engine from a carrier submarine, but also to launch the nuclear power unit on which this device passed a certain amount of time,” Putin said.

There was no independent confirmation that such a test took place.

What is Poseidon?

The Kremlin-affiliated media outlets claim that the Poseidon is designed to travel at up to 200 kilometres per hour.

Known in NATO as “Kanyon”, and formerly labelled “Status-6” by Moscow, the drone is 20 metres long, 1.8 metres in diameter and weighs 100 tonnes, according to Russian media outlets.

Moscow claims that with the nuclear power giving it an unlimited range, the drone’s speed and depth make it hard to locate.

Putin said the Poseidon’s power exceeded that of “even the most promising Sarmat intercontinental-range missile,” the so-called SS-X-29, or Satan II.

The Poseidon is one of six new arms — dubbed “super weapons” — the Russian president mentioned in his 2018 state-of-the-nation address.

Russian media reported that the Poseidon was designed to explode near coastlines and unleash a powerful radioactive tsunami.

Nuclear arms race instead of diplomatic talks

Since announcing the six, including the Poseidon and Burevestnik in 2018, Putin has described the super arsenal as a response to the US strategy to build a missile defence shield.

Last Sunday, Putin announced that Russia tested its “unique” Burevestnik nuclear-ready cruise missile, which the Kremlin described as part of efforts to “ensure the country’s national security”.

Together with Russia’s nuclear drills last week, the Burevestnik test over the past weekend and now the Poseidon test just a few days later, is widely seen as a further message to Washington, following Putin’s words last week, when he stated Moscow will not cave under US sanctions and pressure.

US President Donald Trump has called the Burevestnik test announcement “not appropriate”, noting also that Moscow is aware that the US has a nuclear submarine deployed “right off their shore”.

“(Putin) should get the war ended. A war that should have taken a week is now soon in its fourth year. That’s what he should do instead of testing missiles”, Trump said on Monday.

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Russia Matters, 10/27/25

Vladimir Putin’s announcement of the successful tests of Russia’s nuclear-powered and nuclear-capable Burevestnik missile “constitutes his first serious nuclear saber rattling since Mr. Trump returned to office in January,” said Hanna Notte of the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, according to The New York Times. Putin’s announcement Oct. 26 has not surprised analysts, but is still a cause for concern, NYT reports. According to Jeffrey Lewis, a nuclear nonproliferation expert at Middlebury College, Burevestnik is “a tiny flying Chernobyl… It is one more science fiction weapon that is going to be destabilizing and hard to address in arms control,” NYT reports. However, analysts do question the game-changing capability of the Burevestnik. “It’s not a terribly useful system,” said Pavel Podvig, a Geneva-based analyst of Russian nuclear forces, according to NYT. Readers may recall that in 1957, the USSR launched a rudimentary satellite—the first manmade object in space—called Sputnik. Like Sputnik, Burevestnik’s real impact may be in stimulating a U.S. and allied arms race rather than actually shifting the balance of power between nuclear-capable rivals.*

RT, 10/14/25

Ukraine’s Vladimir Zelensky would be defeated in a presidential vote by military intelligence chief Kirill Budanov as well as former armed forces commander-in-chief Valery Zaluzhny, a new poll has suggested.

Zelensky has repeatedly ruled out holding elections in the country, citing martial law imposed due to the conflict with Russia.

According to a survey released on Monday, conducted by the Kiev-based pollster RATE1 among 1,200 respondents in early October, Zelensky’s political viability continues to wane.

In a scenario pitting Zelensky directly against Budanov, 33% of respondents favored the military intelligence chief as opposed to 32.5% for Zelensky.

In a head-to-head between Zelensky and Zaluzhny, 42.6% of voters said they would back the retired general, who is now serving as Ukraine’s ambassador to the UK, while only 26.3% would support the incumbent leader. A direct race between Zaluzhny and Budanov would give the former a decisive lead, with 44.5% to 22%.

In a broader first-round scenario featuring multiple candidates, Zelensky would still lead among decided voters but with less than one-third of total support, the survey indicated.

Zelensky’s presidential term expired last year, but he remains in power under martial law. The Ukrainian Constitution mandates that presidential authority should transfer to the parliamentary speaker under such circumstances. Russia has said Zelensky is illegitimate.

Earlier this year, US President Donald Trump called the Ukrainian leader a “dictator without elections.” Speculation in the media suggests that Zelensky’s team is quietly preparing for a potential return to the polls, even though he has suggested he would not seek reelection once the conflict with Russia is over.

Neither Zaluzhny nor Budanov has officially declared political ambitions, maintaining that the conflict with Russia must first be resolved.

By Seymour Hersh, Substack, 10/23/25

The battered Russian troops call it the “Horseshoe,” a brutally reinforced area in the hilly northern corner of the Donbas region that blocks the army’s entry from the east to the vast central plains of Ukraine—a path that could lead the Russian army, if it were able to overcome an expected counterattack, deep into central Ukraine and even theoretically to the outskirts of Kiev.

The Horseshoe is bloodied high ground and fortified by trenches, bunkers, and concrete barriers that have kept the Russian army at bay, at great cost in lives and materials. A well-informed American official told me that Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, continues to urge his generals to do an all-out assault and take the area and give Putin what he wants to end the war: total control of the Donbas, which consists of two provinces—Donetsk and Luhansk—that are rich in coal, iron ore, lithium, titanium, and rare earth metals. And Russian history. Russian speakers make up 70 per cent of the region. Russia’s generals, I was told by the official, have so far refused to make another attack on the Horseshoe, citing prior failures, heavy casualties to combat soldiers, and destruction of their tanks and other heavy weapons.

With winter approaching, Putin will not be able to mount a ground offensive until spring and again seek to take all of Donbas, whose Ukrainian-controlled areas have been under heavy Russian drone and missile assault since Russia invaded Ukraine in early 2022. Press reports of the most recent non-summit have emphasized that Putin agreed to freeze all combat along the rest of the front if he is granted control of all of Donbas. President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, despite pressure from the United States, insisted, as he has throughout the history of peace talks with Russia, that he would not alter, as the US official put it to me, “his long-standing position to keep up the empty hope and objective of ‘taking back all of the Ukraine.’”

The irony, or “reality,” as the official put it, is that “Russia has been trying unsuccessfully to capture this sliver of territory for a year and failed with great loss of life by his troops without success.” Zelensky’s gambit, he added wryly, “Might work. Might not.”

The full article (behind a paywall) is available here.