As Ukraine fires US Missiles, Putin sends a chilling message

In many ways, President Vladimir Putin seems to be winning.

Russian forces are pushing ahead in Ukraine. President-elect Donald Trump is returning to the White House. War fatigue is spreading across Europe. North Korean troops have boosted the ranks of his army.

And yet on Thursday, Putin appeared weary, threatened and newly aggrieved as he took his bellicose threats against his Western adversaries to a new level.

Even with the prospect of a friendlier American administration around the corner, he has found himself struggling anew to confront perhaps the biggest failure of his war: Russia’s inability to deter the West from providing colossal amounts of military aid to Ukraine.

As a result, Putin is bringing Russia closer to a direct conflict with the United States than at any point in decades. He announced Thursday evening that Russia had struck Ukraine with a new intermediate-range missile, one with nuclear capabilities, using a televised speech to cast the West as an aggressor that left Moscow with no choice but to respond.

On Friday, Putin told a meeting of military leaders that Russia would continue using and begin regular production of the new missile.

Two months from now, Trump’s second presidency could give Putin the chance to strike a peace deal with Ukraine that he could portray as a victory. But until then, people who study the Kremlin say, Putin is intent on driving home the chilling message that America risks nuclear war as it expands its support for Kyiv.

“The Russian side has clearly demonstrated its capabilities,” Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin’s spokesperson, said on Friday. “The contours of further retaliatory actions, if our concerns are not taken into account, have also been quite clearly outlined.”

Capturing the mood, one of Russia’s most influential security hawks, Sergey Karaganov, a political scientist, published an article on Thursday warning that Russia risked “ripping defeat from the jaws of victory.” To prevail over the West, he argued, the Kremlin needed to step up the threat of nuclear weapons being used.

“Russia has started to win in the fight against Western aggression in Ukraine,” Karaganov wrote. “But it’s early and dangerous to relax. The fight is only beginning.”

Ever since he launched his invasion in February 2022, Putin has mostly been careful to avoid direct military conflict with NATO, even as Western countries poured modern weaponry into Ukraine that killed tens of thousands of Russian soldiers.

But on Thursday, he said in the most explicit terms yet that he was ready for such an escalation: Russia was “entitled,” he said, to strike the military facilities of countries “that allow their weapons to be used against our facilities.”

The main reason for that shift appears clear: President Joe Biden’s recent decision to allow Ukraine to strike deep into Russian territory with U.S.-provided missiles that have a range of 190 miles. That was followed by a similar decision by the British government.

While Ukraine’s present stock of Western missiles is not sufficient to change the course of the war, Putin appears to fear that the West could provide Ukraine with more powerful, longer-range missiles in the future.

“From that point onward,” Putin said Thursday, referring to Ukraine’s missile attacks this week, “the regional conflict in Ukraine provoked by the West has assumed elements of a global nature.”

But some analysts see a second reason Putin may feel prepared to take bigger risks now: Trump’s looming return to the White House.

After all, Putin’s threats about a “global” war dovetail with Trump’s rhetoric about Biden risking World War III. So Putin — who quickly praised Trump after he won the election — may believe that taking more aggressive steps now could help him strike a favorable deal once Trump is inaugurated.

“I don’t see him being concerned about ruining his chances for a deal with Trump — rather, quite the opposite,” said Tatiana Stanovaya, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center. “Trump took the position that Biden’s policies are leading to World War III, and what Putin is doing confirms this.”

Biden long resisted allowing Ukraine to strike deep into Russia with U.S. missiles, to Ukraine’s great frustration, amid concern about Putin’s response. In September, Putin said that such a move would put his country “at war” with NATO, for the first time defining a specific “red line” that he was warning the West not to cross.

This week, the Biden administration crossed it, citing Putin’s own escalation of the war this fall by bringing thousands of North Korean troops into the fight.

Biden administration officials calculate that the risk of escalation by Putin diminished with the election of Trump.

But in Moscow, some question that notion. A former senior Russian official who remains close to the Kremlin said “no one knows” if a deal with Trump is really possible. But “a threat after Biden’s decision has already emerged,” he added, “so we have to respond.” He spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive Kremlin deliberations.

American officials “are overestimating both themselves and the significance of their agenda for others,” said Dmitry Trenin, a hawkish specialist on security policy at Moscow’s Higher School of Economics, suggesting Putin is not so concerned about who holds power in Washington. “Putin has his schedule and his strategy, and he will follow them.”

Still, Putin has repeatedly signaled that he is interested in a negotiated settlement, as long as he is able to keep the land Russia has captured in Ukraine and to extract political concessions, like a guarantee that the country won’t join NATO.

He has often pointed to a draft treaty that Ukrainian and Russian negotiators hammered out in the first months of the invasion in 2022, in which Ukraine would have declared itself “permanently neutral” and accepted limits on the size of its army.

Russia may be “quite cynical and skeptical” about the prospects for a deal after Trump takes office, said Samuel Charap, a senior political scientist at the Rand Corp. “But they still recognize that they need a deal eventually.”

Ukrainian and Western officials contend that Putin is simply looking for a deal only on his terms, tantamount to capitulation.

The 2022 negotiations between Russia and Ukraine fell apart amid disputes over how the West could protect Ukraine from another Russian invasion in the future.

That issue — the shape of “security guarantees” for Ukraine — is likely to loom as the most complicated factor in any renewed talks after Trump returns to the White House, more important than how much Ukrainian territory Russia is allowed to keep control over.

Until then, conditions appear ripe for further escalation — because Russia and Ukraine are jockeying for better negotiating positions before Trump takes office, and because Putin appears determined to deter a further expansion of Western aid to Ukraine that could bring the fighting deeper into Russian territory.

“We’re in an escalatory spiral,” Charap said. Separate from any preparation for future negotiations, he added, that spiral “is a sort of dynamic of its own.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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