War in Ukraine Enters a New Phase — More Erratic and in Danger of Escalation

My husband and I bought a landline telephone this weekend. We also bought an electricity-generating camping stove, some flashlights, and a few cans of soup. We hope that the soups are edible – but we also hope we won’t have to find out. These aren’t exactly the impulse buys I imagined us making this year.Yet here we are. President Putin’s annexation of Ukrainian territory and the recent explosions on the Russian Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines suggest that Mr. Putin is an increasingly desperate man who is allergic to the prospect of military humiliation. This has made him more menacing and – based on recent events – more willing to expand his war.We are at an ostensible end to what might be seen as the first phase in the Kremlin’s war in Ukraine. This phase drew to a close last month, when Ukrainian forces regained territory in Ukraine’s northeastern Kharkiv region. As our Anthony Grant reports, on Sunday Ukraine’s forces additionally routed Russian troops from the strategic eastern city of Lyman.For Kyiv, these recent successes make the prospect of an eventual victory more likely, if only sufficient time and ammunition would allow for it. For the Kremlin, the message has been a different one: its armed forces could yet lose. It is time to change tactics.Indeed, for Russia, the pipeline explosions marked an ostensible strategic shift to a focus on critical infrastructure in Ukraine and the wider West. Even if one were to assume that the blasts were not of Moscow’s doing, infrastructure has, in any event, now fully entered the war.For decades, the Kremlin has been staking out Western vulnerabilities. It was likely behind the 2008 explosion of a Turkish pipeline just days before the start of the Russo-Georgian War. When it illegally annexed Crimea in 2014, its first suspected action was to damage seabed communication cables that disrupted internet connectivity in Ukraine.Its cyberattacks against Western targets are frequent and highly advanced. The Kremlin recognizes the tactical value of attacking information, both physically and psychologically. Its strategy, then, could now unfold along two fronts.On the one hand, persistent military action in the east and south of Ukraine. On the other hand, efforts to sabotage Ukrainian and Western infrastructure – undersea internet and energy links, for example. For Mr. Putin, after all, the West writ large is also the enemy. Both tactics are rooted in Russian military doctrine, which sees modern warfare as an amalgam of military and non-military tools and tactics – the proverbial “gray zone.” If successful, both also could, so Mr. Putin likely hopes, deepen the crises already facing the West, wreak even greater political and economic havoc and, as a result, weaken Kyiv’s ties to the West, on which it remains financially and militarily reliant. Ultimately, Moscow’s strategy is one of attrition, and of bringing about just enough chaos so that everyone but it loses. Whether this is achieved militarily or politically, or through a combination of both, is of little consequence. This next phase of the war could then become more erratic and more escalatory, and with the Kremlin having cast a wider net – threatening, too, the nuclear option.For those of us in Europe – and those in America, too – the coming winter months could then see war draw ever-closer. The Russian ringleader, in his desperation, has made all of us targets in his war. I might yet be forced to try that soup.

War in Ukraine Enters a New Phase — More Erratic and in Danger of Escalation

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