Escalation management is the new appeasement, equivalent to then-British prime minister Neville Chamberlain’s infamous Munich Agreement with Adolf Hitler, according to a recent report by the Washington-based Atlantic Council and many frustrated Ukrainians.
The analogy is misleading and, if taken literally, dangerously so. Twenty-first century Russia is not 1938 Germany, a rising industrial and military power. At the same time, nor was Nazi Germany sitting on the world’s largest nuclear arsenal. Indeed, nuclear weapons did not even exist when Chamberlain traded Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland for a promise of peace.
To help Ukraine halt Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion, without tripping into nuclear Armageddon, escalation management is essential. It is just hard to get right.
Critics of the approach of US President Joe Biden’s administration have a point. While there are surely back-channel exchanges between the White House and the Kremlin that people do not know about, Putin has too often been allowed to do the public management, defining what is or is not an escalation.
The clash over the use of Iranian and NATO missiles is a good example of how that works.
Last week, Putin warned that NATO would be directly at war with Russia if it allowed US and European long-range missiles to be used against targets on Russian soil. That would change the entire nature of the conflict, he said.
The threat was more explicit than in the past and therefore concerning, but it is also unconvincing — unless he chooses to do some actual escalation himself. It takes a little unpacking to explain why that is.
Putin made his threat to influence a US review of its ban against Ukraine firing longer-range NATO-made missiles at Russia. Reportedly, any change in US policy would affect only the Storm Shadow and Scalp cruise missiles that Britain and France have sent to Ukraine, leaving in place restrictions on US-made Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS), a truck-launched short-range ballistic missile, at least for now.
The Biden administration’s rethink might have been prompted by Iran’s transfer of its new Fath-360, mobile short-range ballistic missile system to Russia. That is something the US has been working to prevent for some time and says took place early this month.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken called it a “dramatic escalation” of Iran’s role. So would either the arrival of the Fath-360 or Ukraine’s use of Western-built missiles inside Russia “change everything?”
The first point to make is that Putin has been telling his nation for many months that it is at war with NATO. Another is that while the risk of his launching a nuclear weapon exists, it remains distant. A nuclear strike would bring Russia few if any benefits, but major downsides.
How a few hundred midrange, if sophisticated, conventional missiles are used does not change those core risk-benefit calculations.
Russia has already fired thousands of long-range missiles at Ukraine, many of them far more powerful than High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS) and ATACMs.
Fundamentally, this is not the Cuban missile crisis because neither side has introduced any existential (or even game-changing) weapons to the field.
Storm Shadows, with a range of 250km, would certainly allow Ukrainian forces to hit targets in Russia much faster than they can now with their own drones, but there are too few of the British cruise missiles available to change the course of the war enough that Putin would invite an actual war with the combined forces of NATO.
That would remain true even if the US also lifts restrictions on Ukraine’s use of ATACMS.
That does not mean there is nothing to worry about. Russia is already waging a hybrid war against the West, and that could escalate. From undersea telecommunication cables to energy grids and pipelines, the developed West is a target-rich environment for any hostile actor.
The Fath-360 would also not categorical change the battlefield Putin created with his invasion. The missile system is Iran’s answer to the US HIMARS, which have been operating in Ukraine since late summer of 2022.
The payload and range of the Fath-360 — at about 150kg and 120km respectively — puts it somewhere between the variants of the HIMARS and ATACMS systems the US has given Kyiv for self-defense.
Russia already has its own versions of both US systems, called Tornado-S and Tochka-U, but for a number of reasons, they have struggled to have the same effect.
That is something Samuel Cranny-Evans, an associate fellow at the London-based Royal United Services Institute, has looked at closely.
The Tornado-S looks much like the US M270, which is basically a double HIMARS, carrying 12 missiles instead of six. Similarly, the Tochka-U is rather like an ATACMs, a single larger missile on a truck.
In the critical areas of guidance and accuracy, the equivalence ends. The US versions can — unless jammed — maneuver in flight and strike within in a radius as small as 2m. The Russians versions, especially the Tochka-U, cannot.
On top of that, the Russians have suffered from poor intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance for much of the war, because Ukrainians were shooting down the drones needed to see targets in real time, Cranny-Evans said. If you cannot see your target, it does not matter how accurate your missiles are.
That situation changed since Ukraine began running out of air-defense munitions, so the addition of a reported 200 Iranian HIMARS-like missiles to Russia’s armory could create a significant problem for Ukraine in areas within about 100km of the front, especially because the satellite-guided Fath-360s are maneuverable in flight. They could also free Russia’s much more powerful and sophisticated, but scarce, Iskander missiles for more challenging tasks.
Every new missile Russia gets is bad news for Ukraine, but the only true “escalation” is that some of the long-range, guided artillery being used by Russia would be made in Iran.
The same can be said about Ukraine’s use of NATO-manufactured missiles. That is no reason to consider the Western alliance suddenly at war directly with Russia, any more than Kyiv is already directly at war with Iran, because Russia has been firing Iranian Shahed loitering munitions at targets across Ukraine since 2022.
Of course, Putin knows all this. He wants to be able to replenish his armory with foreign HIMARS equivalents, for use against Ukraine’s deep supply lines and command centers, while applying nuclear intimidation to stop the US giving Kyiv any similar new advantage. There are no Marquess of Queensberry rules in war.
Managing all this is not appeasement, but Ukraine’s allies need to do better job of it, calling out Putin’s manipulations and exaggerations sooner and more clearly, and making sure he does not achieve his goals in this predatory war by simple intimidation.
Marc Champion is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering Europe, Russia and the Middle East. He was previously the Istanbul bureau chief for the Wall Street Journal.
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