Ukraine keeps crossing Russia’s red lines. Putin keeps blinking.

Kyiv’s lightning incursion into Kursk in western Russia this month slashed through the reddest line of all — a direct ground assault on Russia — yet Putin’s response has so far been strikingly passive and muted, in sharp contrast to his rhetoric earlier in the war. On Day One of the invasion in February 2022, Putin warned that any country that stood in Russia’s way would face consequences “such as you have never seen in your entire history,” a threat that seemed directed at countries that might arm Ukraine. “The citizens of Russia can be sure that the territorial integrity of our Motherland, our independence and freedom will be ensured — I emphasize this again — with all the means at our disposal,” making a clear reference to Russia’s nuclear weapons. Now some are again questioning the centerpiece of Washington’s Ukraine strategy: a slow, calibrated supply of weapons to Ukraine to avoid escalating tensions with Russia that critics argue has dashed Kyiv’s chances of driving Russia out and resulted in a grinding war of attrition with massive casualties. Ukraine’s Kursk incursion “proved the Russians are bluffing,” said Oleksandr Danylyuk, a former Ukrainian intelligence and defense official, now an associate fellow with the Royal United Services Institute, a think tank in London. “It shuts down all of the voices of the pseudo experts … the anti-escalation guys.” The attack was “risky,” he continued, “but it sent a very powerful signal and helped us change the narrative about Ukraine — that it is not able to win — and on the Russian red lines. Both narratives have been destroyed.” Advertisement Ukraine’s attacks have repeatedly crossed ostensible red lines: sinking Russia’s Black Sea flagship, Moskva; the 2022 Crimea Bridge blast; Storm Shadow missile attacks on the fleet headquarters in Sevastopol; the 2023 drone attacks on the Kremlin and Moscow; the assassinations of propagandists on Russian territory; and attacks on strategic air bases hundreds of miles from Ukraine. “Within a few months, it seemed that the Kremlin’s red lines had either never existed or had become extremely mobile.” The Kremlin claimed to be unperturbed, she wrote, “even if it flies in the face of common sense.” Advertisement It was to become a striking pattern, yet the U.S.-led policy on military aid to Ukraine has remained timid, according to many analysts. Boris Bondarev, a Geneva-based former Russian diplomat who resigned in 2022 to protest the war, said in an interview that Washington’s fear of triggering a direct military conflict with Russia had crippled the U.S. response, leaving its goals in the war unclear and projecting American weakness to Putin and other global adversaries. “When you put your enemy’s red lines, so to speak, as the crucial factor of your own strategy, you will always be on the losing side,” he said. Advertisement “We are witnessing a significant ideological shift — the naive, illusory concept of so-called red lines regarding Russia, which dominated the assessment of the war by some partners, has crumbled apart these days,” Zelensky said. While Ukraine’s Kursk incursion has changed calculations, it has not shifted the fundamental balance in the war, with Moscow continuing its focus on eastern Ukraine, closing in on the city of Pokrovsk in the Donetsk region, a key logistical hub that could pave the way for further Russian advances if it falls. If Washington did allow Ukraine to strike military targets deeper within Russia with U.S. weapons, it would dash yet one more taboo, but Sergei Markov, a pro-Kremlin analyst, suggested that Moscow had already factored this in. “Russia already considers that the decision has been taken by the U.S.” Advertisement “Russia tried to clearly draw these red lines, but the U.S., which is a participant in the conflict, decided that ‘We’re not going to cross any big red lines but only small ones,’” he said “They decided we are going to cut these red lines into dozens of small thin red threads, to cross them bit by bit so that there was no big event which could become a” cause of war. – This Summarize was created by Neural News AI (V1). Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/08/24/putin-red-lines-war-ukraine/