SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
To donate by check, phone, or other method, see our More Ways to Give page.
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
"It is a question of deciding whether or not NATO countries are directly involved in a military conflict," said Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Russian President Vladimir Putin said Thursday that if the United States and the United Kingdom allow Ukraine to strike deep inside Russia with Western missiles, "it will mean nothing less than the direct involvement of NATO countries."
"This is not a question of allowing the Ukrainian regime to strike Russia with these weapons or not. It is a question of deciding whether or not NATO countries are directly involved in a military conflict," Putin told Russian state TV. "This will be their direct participation, and this, of course, will significantly change the very essence, the very nature of the conflict."
Putin's remarks came amid reports that U.S. President Joe Biden appears poised to let Ukraine use long-range missiles against Russia, signaling a perilous new phase in a deadly war that has dragged on for two and a half years since Russia's invasion in February 2022.
According to The New York Times, "President Biden appears on the verge of clearing the way for Ukraine to launch long-range Western weapons deep inside Russian territory, as long as it doesn't use arms provided by the United States."
"The issue, which has long been debated in the administration, is coming to a head on Friday with the first official visit to the White House by Britain's new prime minister, Keir Starmer," the Times reported Thursday. "Britain has already signaled to the United States that it is eager to let Ukraine use its 'Storm Shadow' long-range missiles to strike at Russian military targets far from the Ukrainian border. But it wants explicit permission from Mr. Biden in order to demonstrate a coordinated strategy with the United States and France, which makes a similar missile."
Ahead of the decision, the Pentagon pointed to Iran's alleged transfer of ballistic missiles to Russia as further reason to bolster Ukraine's military capabilities. A spokesperson for Iran's foreign ministry said in response that "the publication of false and misleading reports about the transfer of Iranian weapons to some countries is simply ugly propaganda to conceal the large illegal arms support of the United States and some Western countries for the genocide in Gaza."
Ukraine, which has received roughly $55.7 billion in military assistance from the U.S. since February 2022, has already launched repeated drone attacks deep inside Russia, but Western permission for Kyiv to use long-range missiles could be a dire escalation.
As Politico noted, Moscow could retaliate against a long-range missile strike on Russia by hitting "a target inside NATO, such as the critical weapons supply hub in the Polish city of Rzeszów." Such an exchange could result in direct conflict between the nuclear-armed powers.
"Military experts argue any guidelines agreed for the British weapons at the two-hour summit in Washington could also then pave the way for the Ukrainians to fire U.S.-supplied ATACMS—a tactical ballistic missile system—at airfields and army bases deep inside Russia," the outlet observed.
The potential intensification and spread of the war comes as the prospect of a diplomatic resolution appears nonexistent, at least in the near term.
Aída Chávez, communications director and policy adviser at Just Foreign Policy, wrote for The Intercept earlier this week that members of the U.S. Congressional Progressive Caucus were "pilloried" over an October 2022 letter urging Biden to "make vigorous diplomatic efforts in support of a negotiated settlement and ceasefire, engage in direct talks with Russia, explore prospects for a new European security arrangement acceptable to all parties that will allow for a sovereign and independent Ukraine, and, in coordination with our Ukrainian partners, seek a rapid end to the conflict and reiterate this goal as America's chief priority."
Today, Chávez wrote, the progressives who signed the letter—which was ultimately withdrawn by the CPC leadership—"look more prescient than ever."
"Since the ill-fated letter, the war has ground on—with devastating results for the people of Ukraine," Chávez continued. "Ukraine is not in a position to win the war, nor does it have a stronger bargaining position in talks than it did in late 2022 when the CPC letter came out."
Relitigating these details two years later cannot be dismissed as an exercise in political archeology. More than two years later, the war drags on with no end in sight.
Victoria Nuland, former Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs and one of the principal architects of the Biden administration’s Russia policy, has now opined on what is perhaps the foggiest episode in a war distinguished by a nearly impenetrable kind of diplomatic opacity: the April 2022 Istanbul peace talks between Russia and Ukraine.
Furthermore she acknowledges that there was a deal on the table and that Western powers didn’t like conditions that would have limited Ukraine's military arsenal, lending credence to the theory that Ukraine’s supporters had a hand in ultimately scuttling it.
To be sure, neither the topic nor the content of Nuland’s comments is new. She is but the latest in a cavalcade of high-profile insiders, including former Israeli Prime Minister Nafatli Bennett and Ukrainian politician Davyd Arakhamia, whose testimony has shed light on the external pressures possibly informing the Zelenskyy government’s fateful decision to pull the plug on Turkish-brokered talks surrounding a draft treaty that would have ended the Ukraine war.
But, if we are to arrive at something approximating a full and unprejudiced post-mortem, it remains a necessary even if ungrateful task to carefully catalog all of these accounts — especially one from as influential a Russia policy figure as Nuland.
“Relatively late in the game the Ukrainians began asking for advice on where this thing was going and it became clear to us, clear to the Brits, clear to others that (Russian President Vladimir) Putin's main condition was buried in an annex to this document that they were working on,” she said, referencing Russia’s stipulation for hard caps and other limits on military personnel and types of weaponry that Ukraine can possess.
Such concessions, she argued, should be rejected by Kyiv because they would leave Ukraine “basically neutered as a military force.” She intimated, unsurprisingly without indulging specifics, that these anxieties were expressed by Western officials: “People inside Ukraine and people outside Ukraine started asking questions about whether this was a good deal and it was at that point that it fell apart,” Nuland said.
Just who “outside Ukraine” posed these questions and precisely what effect did these pointed queries exercise on Ukrainian officials? The full story of that short-lived diplomatic interlude is unlikely to be unraveled until after the war, in no small part due to the obvious political sensitivities at play. But there is now what appears to be, even in the most conservative estimation, a large body of circumstantial evidence that Western actors, quite possibly hailing from the UK and other countries which were designated as “guarantors” of Ukraine’s security under the Istanbul draft treaty, expressed reservations about the Istanbul format.
The extent to which these Western reservations were decisive insofar as they constituted a hard veto over the peace talks is a trickier question. One can reasonably surmise that Ukraine would have found it difficult to ink a deal that did not command at least tacit support from the Western countries on which it overwhelmingly relies, but it is no less true that the talks were fraught and, though there were positive signs of a slow convergence between the Moscow and Kyiv on key issues, the two sides were a considerable ways off from fully harmonizing their positions when the deal was terminated.
Victoria Nuland's comments lend further credence to the proposition that a settlement between Russia and Ukraine was on the table in Istanbul, that the West played a role in shaping Ukrainian thinking on the desirability of pursuing negotiations, and that Western leaders apparently conveyed the view that it was a bad deal.
Relitigating these details two years later cannot be dismissed as an exercise in political archeology; the facts of what transpired in Istanbul are as relevant as ever in informing our thinking about endgame scenarios as the war roils into its third year.
"The Convention on Cluster Munitions provides a vital framework for ending the immediate and long-term harm and suffering caused by these abhorrent weapons," said one of the treaty's architects.
The overwhelming majority of cluster bomb casualties last year were civilians, with children making up nearly half of those killed or maimed by remnants of the internationally banned munitions, a report published Monday revealed.
Human Rights Watch (HRW) published its annual Cluster Munition Monitor report, which "details the policy and practice of all countries with respect to the international treaty that prohibits cluster munitions and requires destruction of stockpiles, clearance of areas contaminated by cluster munition remnants, and victim assistance."
That treaty, the landmark Convention on Cluster Munitions, has been ratified by 112 nations. However, numerous countries that are not parties to the agreement—including Myanmar, Russia, Syria, Ukraine, and the United States—continued to use or sell cluster bombs.
"Cluster munitions can be fired from the ground by artillery, rockets, missiles, or mortars, or dropped by aircraft," HRW explained. "They typically open in the air, dispersing multiple submunitions or bomblets over a wide area. Many submunitions fail to explode on initial impact, leaving unexploded duds that can indiscriminately injure and kill like landmines for years, until they are found and destroyed."
The results have been devastating. According to the report, 93% of cluster munition casualties reported by the monitor last year were civilians, while children made up 47% of those killed or wounded by cluster bomb remnants. Children are particularly vulnerable to unexploded cluster bomblets, which are often mistaken for toys.
According to the report, the following countries suffered more than 1,000 cluster bomb casualties in 2023: Laos (7,810), Syria (4,445), Iraq (3,201), Vietnam (2,135), and Ukraine (1,213).
HRW noted that "Russia has used stocks of old cluster munitions and newly developed models in Ukraine since 2022" and that "between July 2023 and April 2024, U.S. President Joe Biden approved five transfers to Ukraine of U.S. cluster munitions delivered by 155mm artillery projectiles and by ballistic missiles."
Meanwhile, unexploded cluster munitions dropped by the United States during the Vietnam War are still killing and maiming people, mostly children. In Laos, where the U.S. dropped more bombs than all sides in World War II combined, as many as 270 million cluster munitions were sprinkled over the country. Unexploded bomblets have killed an estimated 20,000 Laotians since the end of the war. It is believed that less than 1% of unexploded cluster munitions have been cleared in Laos.
The report highlighted some promising developments:
In December 2023, the convention reached a major milestone when Peru completed the destruction of its stockpiled cluster munitions, as it was the last state party with declared stocks to complete this obligation. Bulgaria, Slovakia, and South Africa announced the completion of the destruction of their respective cluster munition stocks in September 2023. These developments mean that member countries have collectively now destroyed 100% of their declared cluster munition stocks, destroying 1.49 million cluster munitions and 179 million submunitions.
However, there were also setbacks, such as legislation in Lithuania approving the Baltic nation's withdrawal from the cluster bomb treaty.
"Lithuania's ill-considered move to leave the Convention on Cluster Munitions stains its otherwise excellent reputation on humanitarian disarmament and ignores the risks of civilian harm," said HRW deputy crisis, conflict, and arms director Mary Wareham, who edited the new report. "It's not too late for Lithuania to heed calls to stop its planned withdrawal."
Speaking more broadly of the new report, Wareham—a joint recipient of the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize for her work with the International Campaign to Ban Landmines—said that "the Convention on Cluster Munitions provides a vital framework for ending the immediate and long-term harm and suffering caused by these abhorrent weapons."
"All countries should join and adhere to the convention if they are serious about protecting civilians from these weapons in the face of rising conflict," Wareham added.