The US has warned Poland that Russia was plotting to attack it in a “few months” time, which would be the fastest way to end the Ukraine war, in president Vladimir Putin’s ultimate fail. The Russian emperor would go home from Poland not just naked, but also with a broken
Andrew Rettman
The US has warned Poland that Russia was plotting to attack it in a “few months” time, which would be the fastest way to end the Ukraine war, in president Vladimir Putin’s ultimate fail.
The attack could be a small ground incursion from Kaliningrad or Belarus or a missile strike on Polish critical infrastructure, US intelligence said, according to Polish and British media.
Its objective would be to kill Nato, by showing the US did not honour Article V, and to scare EU populations.
I am Polish and it sent a shiver down my spine.
It reminded me of the US warnings ahead of 24 February 2022 that Putin was about to fully invade Ukraine.
And it would be in line with Putin’s strategy so far: fail, so escalate.
He failed to cause regime change in Ukraine via political subversion, so he escalated with a military invasion.
He is now failing in the Ukraine war, so he starts a continental war, no doubt accompanied by nuclear sabre-rattling, to try to get his way, the logic goes.
But the more I thought about it, the surer I was this would spell his doom.
Even if US president Donald Trump pulled American forces out of Poland and gave Putin a wink on Article V, Poland has the third-largest army in Nato and by far the best-funded one.
It fortified its Kaliningrad and Belarus borders years ago.
Even if France, Germany, Italy, and Spain were also wobbly on Article V, I believe the UK, Nordic, and Baltic states, as well as Ukraine, would immediately help Poland to repel Russia and hit back.
Meanwhile, Putin’s military and economy have been exhausted by five years of Ukraine losses and by Western sanctions.
The new Russian emperor would go home from Poland not just naked, but also with a broken nose, Nato or no Nato.
All of his Global South allies, including Brazil, China, India, and South America, would dump him, as I doubt that China’s Xi Jinping, for one, would be happy for the world economy to go up in flames in World War III, just to help a geriatric Russian loser cling to power a bit longer.
If his Nato war also failed, the only step left on the escalation ladder is a nuclear strike.
Putin could fire a little nuclear bomb at a rock in the Arctic Ocean, for instance, to terrorise the West into capitulation and to look like a boss.
But unlike the conventional ladder, nuclear escalation is much harder to manage.
The minute Putin’s ’12th GUMO’ nuclear forces began taking warheads from silos to match them with missiles, or his nuclear submarines began surging out from Murmansk, Western intelligence would know, but they would not know how little his strike was going to be or where he was planning to attack, quite possibly leading Pentagon hotheads to push Trump into a first strike, just to be on the safe side.
If I know this from interviews with ex-Nato officials, then Putin and the Russian generals know it too – and they are not so illiterate or poor as they used to be that they would gladly join his funeral pyre.
All this is why I’m optimistic that Putin’s cycle of fail, so escalate, is shortly going to end with the ultimate fail (his fall from power), and not the ultimate global escalation.
