New York, Sep 9: Russian President Vladimir Putin, whose invasion of Ukraine and the entrapment in a battlefield quagmire there defies logic, has reveled in making this unpredictability his persona to play mindgames with the nuclear threat.
This peril has put limits on how far the West – which in any case doesn’t really have a firm centre – would go in their defence of Ukraine.
Putin appeared to draw a redline when he said last September that “we will certainly use all the means at our disposal” when his country is “threatened”. “It’s not a bluff,” he added.
In response, US President Joe Biden said the next month that Putin was “not joking when he talks about the use of tactical nuclear weapons or biological or chemical weapons”. The West is united in its rhetoric against Russia and, to a large extent, financial aid to Ukraine and sanctions on Moscow, but differences emerge when it comes to arming Kiev. It has drawn its own line, a shifting one, though, on how far to go. It has moved enough that the US and its allies have slowly started increasing their supply of defence equipment like tanks and F-16 fighter jets – and even the cluster bombs banned by many in the West.
Germany was reluctant to send Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine lest it be singled out by Russia and insisted that the US send M1 Abrams tanks as a condition for its aid. As for F-16s, Biden said Ukraine didn’t need them, but was shamed into agreeing to send them by offers of Denmark and Sweden to send them. Western Europe – or Europe – itself falls into clusters, some of them overlapping and they all have common interests as well as differences driven by national interests. (IANS)
There is the military alliance, NATO, whose fears of expansion could have been a factor behind the Russian invasion.
The invasion propelled Finland to give up its neutrality and join the pact. Sweden also joined in – after overcoming objections from Turkey, a country that seldom registers as Western. (IANS)