A menacing message to the West

Vladimir Putin’s hypersonic missile carried a simple message to the West over Ukraine: back off, and if you don’t, Russia reserves the right to hit US and British military facilities.

Russia fired a new intermediate-range hypersonic ballistic missile known as “Oreshnik”, or Hazel Tree, at Ukraine on Thursday in what Putin said was a direct response to strikes on Russia by Ukrainian forces with US and British missiles.

In a special statement from the Kremlin just after 8 pm in Moscow that day, the Russian president said the war was escalating towards a global conflict, though he avoided any nuclear rhetoric.

Putin has also refrained, so far, from actually striking the West, a step that could lead to a direct confrontation between Russia and the NATO alliance – and a confrontation that US President Joe Biden said in March 2022 would be World War III.

In his statement, the Kremlin chief gave the West notice that Russia reserved the right to strike at the military installations of countries that let Ukraine use their missiles to hit Russia – so far only the United States and Britain, according to a Reuters report.

A Russian source who spoke on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the situation said Putin had hinted that he wanted to steer clear of escalation, though the odds of Russia using nuclear weapons remained pretty high.

President Biden dropped his opposition to Ukraine firing US missiles at targets deep inside Russia in response to North Korea’s entry to the war, a shift in US policy that took on added urgency following Donald Trump’s Nov.5 election win, sources familiar with the matter told Reuters on Thursday.

Russian officials cast the move by Biden as a reckless decision by a lame-duck outgoing administration aimed at creating a serious crisis for Trump to resolve when he is inaugurated as president in January.

That puts Putin in a difficult position: if he escalates now, he could stoke just such a crisis. But if he doesn’t, then the West could interpret him as weak and keep pushing through clear Russian red lines.

When Putin warned in September that Russia would update its nuclear doctrine to allow potentially a nuclear response to the use of conventional Western missiles to strike Russia, US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said it was not the first time he had “rattled the nuclear sabre”.

The day Ukraine fired US-made ATACMS missiles deep into Russian territory, Putin approved the lowering of the nuclear threshold flagged two months earlier, the Reuters report adds.

After Putin lowered the threshold, the Pentagon said that the United States had not changed its nuclear posture - or observed a change in Russia’s nuclear posture.

When asked what the main message of Putin’s statement was, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Friday that the key thing was that Russia will react to “reckless actions” from Western countries which take part in strikes on Russia.

Besides warning that US and British military facilities could be targeted, Putin said Washington’s plans to deploy short- and intermediate-range missiles in Europe and Asia could prompt Moscow to do the same – bringing its firepower within closer striking range of the West.

Kremlin spokesman Peskov said Russia was not technically obliged to warn Washington about the strike, because the missile was intermediate-range rather than intercontinental, but he said Moscow had informed the US 30 minutes beforehand anyway.

And while Putin pointedly avoided mention of nuclear weapons in his statement, the new hypersonic missile Russia fired at Dnipro in Ukraine can be equipped with nuclear warheads, and can reach Europe or the west coast of the United States.