Putin escalates war on the West in Europe and Middle East

Putin’s threats have periodically raised the fear that Russia could escalate beyond Ukraine.

Since the war in Ukraine started, avoiding escalation — a leap into a larger, more globally consuming conflict — has been US President Joe Biden’s abiding preoccupation. But nearly three years in, the reality is that the war has already sprawled and escalated, just not quite in the ways many observers might expect.

Concerns about escalation have flared in recent weeks, as Biden has considered whether to allow Ukraine to use US weapons, notably ATACMS missiles, to conduct long-range strikes into Russia. (Kyiv has already been using those missiles against Russian targets within occupied Ukraine, while employing its own drones and munitions to strike within Russia.)

Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, says that a more lethal, comprehensive strike campaign is crucial to ravaging Russian rear areas, command centers and arms depots, as Ukraine managed to do in spectacular attacks over the last week. US officials and some outside analysts are reportedly skeptical that Washington and its allies can provide enough of the relevant missiles, which are among the scarcest, highest-value tools in their arsenals, to make a major difference.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, however, would apparently prefer not to find out: He has warned that if Western countries give Ukraine the go-ahead, they will effectively become belligerents in the conflict, with all the fallout that might follow — and on Wednesday said he is revising Russia’s nuclear doctrine to reflect that threat.

The fallout that Biden himself has long warned of is “World War III.” In late 2022 and early 2023, US officials worried that Russia might escalate within Ukraine by using battlefield nuclear weapons. Putin’s threats have also periodically raised the fear that Russia could escalate beyond Ukraine, by retaliating militarily against the Western countries whose weapons are keeping Kyiv in the fight.

But these aren’t the most likely forms of Russian escalation, since they threaten to bring NATO — and thus the US — directly into the fighting, turning a war that Moscow might win into one that, in all probability, it would lose. More likely is an intensification of two types of asymmetric escalation that Russia is already undertaking, meant to punish Ukraine’s backers without provoking full-on war with the West.

First is an ongoing campaign of sabotage and subversion targeting Europe. Putin hasn’t fired missiles at Warsaw or London; he hasn’t sent his remaining troops to invade Poland or the Baltic states. Russia has conducted quasi-covert operations: targeting railroads, warehouses and other key logistical facilities, sometimes by hiring local criminals or refugees as geopolitical “gig workers.” These operations remain below the threshold of conventional war, but they can still be quite violent: US and German authorities thwarted a plot to assassinate the chief executive officer of Rheinmetall AG, an arms maker whose wares are sustaining Ukraine.

Don’t expect Putin to openly take responsibility for this campaign of unrest and murder. But the message, if implicit, isn’t hard to understand: If European countries, or even private citizens, involve themselves in the Ukraine conflict, they shouldn’t expect to come out unscathed.

The second type of escalation involves exacerbating geopolitical turmoil in other conflict zones, particularly the Red Sea. This summer, Putin considered providing Yemen’s Houthis with advanced anti-ship cruise missiles, which could cause deadly havoc for patrolling US warships as well as civilian vessels. He reportedly backed down only at the behest of Saudi Arabia’s de facto leader, Mohammed bin Salman.

Yet there are signs that Russian personnel are still aiding the Houthis in an advisory capacity, and now — as Washington mulls its escalatory options in Ukraine — news reports indicate that Putin is again considering
providing those anti-ship missiles. If Washington helps Ukraine strike Russia, Putin may help the Houthis disrupt freedom of the seas and bloody the superpower that maintains it.

The Russia-Houthi connection is one thread in the growing web of ties between the actors that are most committed to destroying the existing international order. And from Putin’s perspective, increased support for the Houthis would be a strategic twofer, distracting the US from Ukraine while also penalizing America for its role in that war.

None of this is to say that the US shouldn’t increase support for Ukraine. At this stage, it is hard to see how Ukraine and its supporters can make Putin negotiate a decent peace unless they find harsher ways of battering his army, bringing the war to his soil, and making his economy groan. But Ukraine’s supporters shouldn’t delude themselves by thinking that there will be no Russian reaction to such moves, given Putin’s ability to exact a price in so many places and so many ways.

The conflict in Ukraine is a global proxy war, a high-stakes conflict that is drawing in rival countries and coalitions from around the world. The effects of wars with global implications rarely stay contained. Today, the war’s effects are already spilling over into other regions, albeit unconventionally and asymmetrically. The more matters escalate between Ukraine and Russia, the more intense that global spillover may become.

Credit: Bloomberg