Early Thursday morning, 22 November 2024, a Russian experimental intermediate-range ballistic missile hit the city of Dnipro in eastern Ukraine. The multiple-warhead, non-nuclear missile destroyed an industrial site, a medical rehabilitation centre and homes. It was fired from the Astrakhan region of Russia, says the Ukrainian government, meaning that it travelled about 500 miles.
Dnipro sits on the historically and strategically important Dnipro River. It is one of the largest cities in Ukraine with a population of over 950,000. It is about 300 miles from the Russian border and about 65 miles from the nuclear power plant at Zaporizhzhia.
As reported by the BBC, Putin said that the missile, codenamed Oreshnik, was a response to the use, by Ukraine, of US and UK long-range weaponry to hit targets inside Russia. Putin added that Russia was prepared to attack the military facilities of those countries which allowed their weapons to be used for this purpose.
Where do we go from here?
Putin is obviously sabre-rattling again, but this time with more specific threats, including a potential nuclear option.
I fear he has nowhere to go but to continue the aggression. If he stops now and pulls back, he could be finished; so he feels he has to continue with what most despotic leaders do, which is continue the war against the “external enemy” in defence of the “motherland”, despite this narrative being blatantly untrue. It’s the only way he can portray himself internally to the Russian people. He’s got himself into this corner, and the only way forward is with continuing attacks on Ukraine and, in a virtual sense, his threats on the West. He is hoping that the US and the UK will back down.
Some say his strategy is to prepare the way for Trump’s “solution” to the war after he is inaugurated on 20 January 2025. Other pundits talk about Ukraine being divided up with most of it becoming either a puppet state or fully converted to a Russian state. He may well succeed in this ambition. It appears that the mood in the US is to see an end to the war. That goes for Europe as well. Germany is in a weak position and will reduce its financial and military support. For the next six weeks at least, the focus in Germany will be on the general election and who will be the next Chancellor. Their economy isn’t in shape, and the country faces the rising power of the extreme right, which appears to want greater alignment with Russia.
How long can Ukraine hold out?
Also, one must ask, how long will the weapons stocks of the Tactical Missile System, the US ATACMS and the Franco-British Storm Shadow, last? Russian troops, now supported by 10,000 Korean troops, are inching their way forward in eastern Ukraine. Inevitably, there is anxiety as to how long Ukraine can hold out against this onslaught without boots on the ground from European allies.
Putin doesn’t care about the fact that his economy is in a mess, with over 40% of GDP being allocated to military expenditure and the Russian Central Bank raising interest rates to 21%. I contend that none of these economic factors are going to knock Putin off course. Instead his disinformation campaign in the West and the USA will continue alongside his military action in Ukraine.
Warnings from history
This war has given us one useful lesson. It shows that Putin would be unable to mount a war on multiple fronts against NATO countries. He is struggling to win something concrete in Ukraine. If he then took on NATO countries and tried to attack Finland and the Baltic states, as well as Eastern Europe, he would fail just as Hitler and Napoleon failed in the reverse direction by biting off too much.
Nevertheless, there is a warning for the West in all of this, in that if the dividing up of Ukraine is accepted as the solution, Putin won’t just stop there. He’s only 72 years old, so he could go on for another 20 years in his campaign to pull all of the Eastern European states that once were part of the USSR into the Russian sphere of influence.
I believe there is no choice but for the West to oppose Putin’s expansionism in Ukraine, because accepting a pause will just give him respite to build up his military machine and start all over again. In the past, he has attacked Georgia with partial success and, in 2014, whilst Ukraine was going through a democratic revolution, he took Crimea. Then he started on the Donbas in eastern Ukraine. This was followed with the full-scale invasion of Ukraine itself. The trajectory is clear, and Putin can only offer more of the same. We have the warnings from history and we should be preparing ourselves.
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