A few weeks ago, talk suddenly turned to nuclear weapons — the president of the United States spoke openly of Armageddon at a fund-raising dinner. Why? Because Russia was suffering humiliating losses and engaging in strategic retreats in Ukraine, ahead of a new winter strategy.
But all that talk started to fade as Russia consolidated its positions and shifted to a new phase of the war, in which it is destroying Ukraine’s civic infrastructure. The attacks on power stations have a double intent; they are meant to demoralize Ukraine and squeeze its struggling war economy even harder, but they also shift the flow of electricity throughout Europe’s grid — meaning more support has to flow from Europe to Ukraine, rather than from Ukraine to the rest of Europe as usual.
It’s possible that one side or the other in the Ukraine–Russia war will simply tap the floor and beg for negotiations to end the conflict. But I think it’s far likelier that we will return to a sense of crisis and perhaps nuclear panic before this war is over.
The Russian Duma’s annexation of four Ukrainian oblasts raises the stakes for Russia. Ukraine is still demanding a return of all its territory, including Crimea — which the Russians seized in 2014 with hardly any violence at all. And the NATO alliance is still in its predicament of becoming pot-committed to the conflict. U.S. policy influencers dream lazily about not just inflicting regime change on Moscow but dismembering the entire Russian federation.
But such goals for NATO in this war necessarily bring with them risks of vertiginous escalation. Regimes that fear for their survival take desperate gambles — see Japan taking on the much larger and more prosperous United States in World War II because our oil embargo was choking the economic viability out of the Japanese Empire.
That is why realists are looking for sensible off-ramps. Because it would be very easy for this conflict to grind on until its resolution can end only with a humiliation for NATO — abandonment of Ukraine, closing the open-door policy into NATO, or destabilizing the Russian state, with all the geopolitical and nuclear dangers that entails.