Revving Russia's Red Lines

As Ukrainian defensive lines crack, hardliners in Ukraine, EU and US want to push Russia over the brink. They hope to launch an escalatory spiral that results in a full-scale US armed intervention

Tachometers measures an engine’s revolutions per minute (rpm). Revving past the red line means pushing the engine past its limits.

As the spectre of defeat looms larger for Ukraine, radical factions in Kiev, Brussels and Washington DC, are agitating for attacks that cross Russia’s red lines. They aim to provoke a Russian overreaction that would force the West to intervene directly in the Donbass. Although unlikely, a massive Western military intervention has always been the only conceivable path to a Ukrainian victory over Russia. However, the West has wisely kept this option off the table. Russia would view an invasion by a 32-nation army as an existential threat, and would likely respond with nuclear weapons. Once NATO bases in Europe begin to disintegrate under mushroom clouds, a short escalatory spiral of reprisals could quickly lead to global nuclear catastrophe.

Hardliners are calling for America to grant Ukraine permission to fire Western missiles deep into Russia. Already Ukraine is constantly launching long range drones against Russian targets deep into the massive nation’s rear zones. The drone attacks are not pushing Russia’s red lines since Ukraine has just as much right to attack Russia with its own weapons as Russia does in attacking Ukraine. The key escalatory factor that hardliners seek is Western complicity for deep attacks into Russia. In Russia’s eyes, this would make the West a combatant and justify Russian airstrikes on European airbases.

In addition, Ukraine has been agitating for Poland to enter the fray by shooting down Russian missiles as they fly over western Ukraine. Presumably for the Ukrainians, a Polish air defense intervention into Ukraine would be a first step towards wider NATO support.

NATO reacted strongly to Poland’s irresponsible push for escalation.

A dilemma can arise in an alliance where there are vast differences in military power between the partners. On one hand, the more powerful nations must reassure the weaker members that they will be protected in case of an attack. On the other hand, the stronger nations do not want the weaker ones to feel so emboldened that they start provoking powerful neighbours. During the Ukraine war, the smaller Baltic nations and the middling power of Poland have at times been reckless with their rhetoric. As frontline nations sharing borders with Russia, they are in the greatest danger. For the alliance, these frontline nation’s strategic geographic locations are strong assets for basing missiles or surveillance infrastructure. But NATO does not need loose cannons hell bent on provoking a wider war.

Meanwhile, Britain and Denmark have also publicly pushed for escalation, while Germany and the U.S., the two most powerful members of the alliance—who would bear the brunt of the fighting and expense of a war—have been much more cautious.

In the Western information space, Russia has faced heavy criticism and even mockery for not enforcing its red lines. Even patriotic Russian war bloggers on Telegram express their frustration after each significant blow Russia suffers from Ukraine. Meanwhile, Western provocateurs ridicule cautious German and American politicians, egging them on to increase the pressure on Russia by claiming that Putin is far too weak to uphold any of his red lines.

A look back to the red lines that Russia announced in 2022 shows that none have been broken, or that they were stated with enough ambiguity to plausibly deny any transgressions by the West:

As for the red lines, we have already designated them. First of all, these are the deliveries of long-range or more powerful weapons to Kiev. Specific measures of response to the actions by the United States and its allies supplying weapons to the Kiev regime will be defined following a thorough analysis of the developing situation,” Director of the Russian Foreign Ministry’s Second CIS Department Alexey Polischchuk told TASS news agency on Sunday.

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On Friday, US State Department Principal Deputy Spokesperson Vedant Patel said that the administration of US President Joe Biden has repeatedly stated that it has no intention of taking direct part in the conflict between Ukraine and Russia.

“As long as the United States or our allies are not attacked, we are not going to get directly engaged in this conflict either by putting American troops to fight in Ukraine or attacking Russian forces,” Patel reiterated.

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Last month, Zakharova warned the United States that if they decided to supply Kiev with longer-range missiles, it would cross a “red line” and become “a party to the conflict” in Ukraine.

Russia has since clarified that the term "long-range weapons" refers specifically to actual attacks deep inside Russian territory. This distinction is crucial because to Russia, the Crimea and the four contested Ukrainian oblasts are today officially considered Russian territory.

The Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR) is an informal international agreement that limits members from exporting missiles with a range exceeding 300 kilometres or carrying warheads heavier than 500 kilograms. Russia's red lines would be crossed if missiles that do not comply with MTCR guidelines were provided to Ukraine. Additionally, if MTCR-compliant missiles were launched deep into Russia—meaning within Russia's internationally recognized borders—it would also breach these red lines. Recently, Ukraine has requested U.S. permission to violate both of these boundaries: they seek missiles with a 1,000-kilometer range and intend to use their 300-kilometer range missiles to strike deep into Russian territory.

Ukraine's invasion of Kursk is cited as the motivation for pushing these red lines. The Russian military employs a "Deep Operation" doctrine, which involves attacking rear areas to disrupt and weaken the enemy's front lines. Ukrainian Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskyi, trained in Soviet doctrine, understands that a ground invasion is futile if the enemy's rear cannot be attacked. In fact, during the 1980s, even the U.S. Army adapted the Soviet Deep Operation doctrine into AirLand Battle, which was effectively used in Operation Desert Storm in 1991.

Ukraine’s chances of success in the Kursk offensive are indeed slim without the ability to strike deep into Russian rear areas. Without this capability, the entire operation becomes untenable. Nevertheless, CNN reports that the U.S. is rejecting Ukraine's pleas and will not change its policy on deep strikes.

“We consider strikes deep into Russian territory with American weapons no more provocative than strikes with American weapons on Russian territory near the border,” the Ukrainian lawmaker told CNN. “Both are Russian territory and it makes no difference how deep the targets are.”

Instead, Ukraine has used its long-range US weapons, such as Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS), to take out advanced Russian air defenses inside occupied Crimea.

Previously, the US has allowed Ukraine to use American weaponry to strike Russian forces near the border as Kyiv defended itself against cross-border attacks. Russia launched a new offensive in the Kharkiv region in May, but after seizing some new territory, Ukraine was able to slow advancing Russian forces, particularly as the Biden administrated eased some restrictions on the use of US weapons.

But the Biden administration has refused to allow Ukraine to use US weapons for long-range strikes deep into Russian territory.

“You’ve heard us say that the Ukrainians can use US security assistance to defend themselves from cross-border attacks, in other words counter-fire,” said Pentagon press secretary Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder on Tuesday. “But as it relates to long-range strike, deep strikes into Russia, our policy has not changed.”

Ukraine is launching a PR campaign aimed at pressuring the U.S. to lift its ban on long-range strikes. Soon, emotional images of fallen Ukrainian soldiers will likely dominate Western media in an effort to compel President Biden to reconsider. The invasion of Kursk appears to be a pretext to draw the U.S. further into the conflict and potentially trigger a spiral of escalation that could lead to full Western military involvement in Ukraine.

However, the Financial Times, which is dogmatically pro-Ukrainian as well as deep links to the Biden Administration, throws cold water on the idea that the US will allow itself to be manipulated into escalation:

With its Kursk offensive, Ukraine has not only crossed Russia’s borders. It has also crossed red lines set in Washington.

Ever since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the US has insisted that its goal is to help Ukraine defend its territory and survive as a sovereign state. Any suggestion that the war could be taken into Russia has been regarded as dangerous.

In the aftermath of the Kursk incursion, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine has been contemptuous of the restraints that America has placed on Ukraine’s war efforts, denouncing the “naive, illusory concept of so-called red lines regarding Russia, which dominated the assessment of the war by some partners”. That view, said the Ukrainian president, has now “crumbled”.

But has it? The difference between the caution in Washington and the risk-taking in Kyiv reflects not just a difference in analysis about how far Vladimir Putin can be pushed. It is also a reflection of a subtle difference in war aims.

At the start of the conflict, President Joe Biden set his administration two goals. The first was to support Ukraine. But the second was to avoid world war three. If forced to choose between those two aims, the US would clearly choose the latter.

But Ukraine is fighting for its survival. It would accept direct US involvement in a war with Russia. According to a recent book by David Sanger, Biden even suggested to his aides that Zelenskyy might be deliberately trying to draw America into a third world war.

In Zelensky’s defense, his predicament is similar to the one Winston Churchill faced in 1940: how to persuade the U.S. to join a war that Britain couldn't win on its own? However, with more than ten thousand nuclear weapons in play today, the stakes are far higher. The question now is whether Zelensky is bold enough to order one of his new F-16s—nuclear-capable on paper—to strike across the Russian border, potentially triggering Russia’s nuclear warning system.

From the Bay of Pigs Tragedy to the Kursk Farce

As a desperate invasion falters, hard-line factions initiate a guilt-tripping campaign to pressure the U.S. President into abandoning his previous red lines to launch a massive American intervention to save the brave warriors being slaughtered by the enemy, largely due to their lack of airpower.

Sound familiar? This is the crisis President John F. Kennedy faced as the CIA-backed invasion of Fidel Castro’s Cuba stalled on the desolate beaches of the Bay of Pigs in April 1961. JFK had approved the operation and, at the last minute, even changed the landing point away from the middle-class city of Trinidad to the remote Bay of Pigs, surrounded by swamps. Future critics would claim that JFK intentionally sabotaged an invasion he no longer believed in but was too weak to call off.

The planning for the invasion was triggered by Fidel Castro’s expropriation and nationalization of American oil company assets in Cuba. JFK inherited the plans from the Eisenhower Administration and justified their implementation in response to the installation of long-range Soviet missiles in Cuba. The plan involved 1,400 Cuban exiles, trained by the CIA, conducting an amphibious landing on Cuba, which was supposed to ignite a counterrevolution against Castro. However, both Soviet and Cuban intelligence had thoroughly infiltrated the operation and were well aware of what was coming.

In the moment of crisis, JFK was strongly urged to launch a full-scale invasion or, at the very least, a devastating bombing campaign to support the anti-Castro freedom fighters. These exiles, facing a Cuban force of 20,000 soldiers personally led by Castro, were unable to establish any kind of beachhead. Despite intense pressure, JFK , who had announced his red lines a week earlier, refused to authorize an overt U.S. intervention, despite significant US covert involvement:

There will not be under any conditions an intervention in Cuba by United States Armed Forces. This government will do everything it possibly can and I think it can meet its responsibilities to make sure that there are no Americans involved in any action inside of Cuba.

Two contradictory requirements governed the Bay of Pigs invasion: it had to be both clandestine and successful. JFK himself quipped that the operation was too large to remain secret but too small to succeed.

Despite personally approving and tinkering with the plan, JFK blamed the CIA for the fiasco and fired its director, Allen Dulles. This marked the beginning of a period of intense animosity between JFK and the CIA, culminating in his assassination in Dallas in late 1963. The most credible conspiracy theory suggests that the assassination was orchestrated by rogue elements within the CIA, utilizing anti-Castro Cubans. Public patsy Lee Harvey Oswald had, a few months before the assassination, made a public spectacle of handing out “Fair Play for Cuba” leaflets and gave a radio interview in which he defended Castro. In the pre-social media era, Oswald's actions were likely an attempt to link the impending assassination to Castro. The assassins likely hoped their false flag operation would finally trigger a U.S. invasion of Cuba.

The Bay of Pigs disaster occurred in a period of growing Soviet confidence. Just a week before the invasion, the Soviets launched the first man into space, Yuri Gagarin. This series of U.S. humiliations emboldened the Soviets, leading them to deploy long-range nuclear missiles in Cuba to deter any future American invasion attempts. By doing so, the Soviets pushed geopolitical tensions far beyond America's red lines. On the brink of nuclear holocaust, a compromise was reached: the Soviets agreed to remove their missiles from Cuba in exchange for the U.S. withdrawing its nuclear strike force from Turkey.

50 Shades of Red Lines

The Rubicon River, named after the Latin word for red due to the color of its muddy banks, was the original "red line." As the boundary between Cisalpine Gaul and Italy, the Rubicon marked the limit of direct rule from Rome. No general was allowed to cross into Italy with his legions. When Caesar defied this boundary, Pompey fled Rome, sparking a civil war that Caesar ultimately won. At first glance, it might seem that Caesar incurred no penalty for his transgression, but five years later, he was assassinated in the Senate by anti-monarchical conspirators.

In geopolitics, a red line serves as a mechanism of deterrence, signalling a threshold beyond which an adversary will face punitive action. In theory, a red line is a clear and unequivocal warning: cross this boundary, and you will be punished. However, in practice, red line diplomacy is far more complex and often messy. For a red line to be effective, the boundary must be explicitly defined, as well as the consequences for crossing it. This clarity allows the adversary to assess the risk of engaging in prohibited actions. Crucially, the adversary must believe that the issuer of the red line is both capable and willing to enforce the threatened punishment. Without this credibility, a red line loses its deterrent power, potentially inviting the very actions it was meant to prevent.

War is a dynamic and competitive process, so there can never be any fixed "rules" to follow. Deception and ambiguity often prove to be more powerful weapons than clarity and predictability. Setting a clear and precise red line tells your adversary exactly how far they can push without risking catastrophic consequences. Even more dangerously, a clear red line signals to rogue actors exactly what covert actions they need to undertake to escalate tensions toward the brink of Armageddon.

Could dead-enders, adamant in their refusal to accept defeat in Ukraine, go so far as to launch false flag attacks on NATO bases with the goal of provoking the US into retaliatory strikes? An even more dangerous gambit would be for Ukrainian forces to clandestinely shoot down American drones or manned aircraft over the Black Sea, and then orchestrating a finger pointing campaign against Russia.

One recent theatre of war where red lines played an important role is the Western-instigated civil war in Syria. In August of 2012, President Obama set out US red lines on the use of chemical weapons by the Assad government:

A red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized. <…> if we start seeing movement on the chemical weapons front or the use of chemical weapons.

Obama, a Harvard-educated lawyer, understands that the phrase "whole bunch" is, to say the least, steeped in ambiguity. In the aftermath, several Western reports claimed that the Syrian government had indeed used chemical weapons. To this day, there is no consensus on the credibility of these reports or on which side actually used the weapons. Did Obama’s vague red lines give Assad the green light to gas his opponents? Or did rogue Western factions seize the opportunity to push for direct U.S. intervention in an attempt to salvage yet another flailing regime change project?

Israel has been famously prodigious in employing red line rhetoric to cap the growth of Iran’s nuclear weapons program. So much so that in 2012, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu displayed a childish diagram representing Iran’s nuclear weapons program:

Holding up a cartoon-like drawing of a bomb with a fuse, Mr Netanyahu literally drew a red line just below a label reading "final stage" to a bomb, in which Iran was 90 per cent along the path of having sufficient weapons-grade material.

Experts put that at the point that Iran has amassed enough uranium, purified to a level of 20 per cent, that could quickly be enriched further and be used to produce an atomic bomb.

Mr Netanyahu told the UN he believed that faced with a clear red line, Iran would back down in a crisis that has sent jitters across the region.

Israel is not capable of launching a conventional attack on Iran that would decisively destroy its nuclear weapons program. Such an attack could backfire, giving Iran a moral imperative to produce a robust nuclear arsenal to deter future Israeli or American attacks.

As a result, Iran has disregarded Israeli red lines. In 2015, Iran and the U.S. reached an accord that limited Iran’s nuclear program. However, in 2018, President Trump withdrew from the agreement, although the international community insisted that Iran continue to comply unilaterally. Remarkably, Iran adhered to the accord's restrictions until 2019. As of today, Iran reportedly possesses 164.7 kg of uranium enriched up to 60%. While weapons-grade uranium must be 90% enriched, the leap from 60% to 90% is much easier than the earlier stages of enrichment. Iran’s publicly declared program has the ability to eventually produce four or five weapons. If Iran has any brains, they would have secretly produced a number of bombs years ago.

Over the past year, Israel has been testing Iran’s red lines, most recently by assassinating Ismail Haniyeh, the leader of Hamas' political wing. Although Iran has threatened retaliation, it has yet to act. This restraint suggests that Iran is keen not to lose the initiative or be provoked into undesirable actions by its enemies. Only after Iran has secured the necessary defensive measures—potentially including acquiring nuclear weapons and powerful air defense systems from Russia—will Tehran seek to impose deterrence on Tel Aviv through military action.

Thomas Schelling was instrumental in shaping nuclear deterrence strategies during the early stages of the nuclear age. In his seminal work Arms and Influence, Schelling drew on game theory to craft his theories on deterrence. He argued that a credible deterrence strategy relies on the perception that retaliation is inevitable once a nation's red lines are crossed. To maintain this credibility, Schelling advocated for what could be described as a retaliatory autopilot—a system programmed to automatically unleash a devastating response if those red lines were violated. This concept was designed to remove ambiguity, ensuring that potential aggressors understood the severe consequences of crossing such thresholds.

If we could really make it believed that we would launch general war for every minor infraction of any code of etiquette that we wanted to publish for the Soviet bloc, and if there were high probability that the leaders in the Kremlin knew where their interests lay and would not destroy their own country out of sheer obstinacy, we could threaten anything we wanted to.

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If we could credibly arrange it so that we had to carry out the threat, whether we wished to or not, we would not even be crazy to arrange it so-if we could be sure the Soviets understood the ineluctable consequences of infringing the rules and would have control over themselves.

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What we have to do is to get ourselves into a position where we cannot fail to react as we said we would-where we just cannot help it-or where we would be obliged by some overwhelming cost of not reacting in the manner we had declared. (p. 42-3)

Schelling’s work was highly influential throughout the world. Soviet nuclear strategists took his lessons to heart and endeavoured to fool proof their nuclear weapons launch protocols to be purely automatic and outside of any human intervention. Luckily they failed and the world survived a lesser-known nuclear crisis in 1983.

Reagan: Taching Soviet Red Lines

The profound anxiety triggered first by the Bay of Pigs fiasco and then by the Cuban Missile Crisis ushered in an era of détente (relaxation in French) between the U.S. and the USSR. Imagining a metaphorical geopolitical tachometer, the period of détente dialled down US-Soviet tensions toward an idle zone. Tensions persisted, but they were restrained and checked through careful policy. Given the inevitably cyclical nature of human activity, as peace reigned during the détente period, people forgot the nuclear trauma of the early sixties.

Eventually within the U.S., the détente doves, largely overseen by Henry Kissinger, were challenged a faction of neoconservative hawks within the US. Centred around Team B within the CIA, these budding foreign policy leaders of the GOP militated for a more hostile approach to the Soviet Union. Today, their ideological progeny are the main force pushing for a no-limits U.S. approach in Ukraine.

Following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and the resulting US-led proxy insurgency by radical Islamist freedom fighters, geopolitical tensions clicked higher. Following Ronald Reagan’s election victory in 1980, Team B took power and the US launched a PYSOP which sought to intentionally rev US-Soviet tensions into the nuclear red zone. In response, the Soviet Union launched Operation RYAN, an espionage effort to uncover the West’s nuclear intentions.

From Benjamin B. Fischer’s A Cold War Conundrum: The 1983 Soviet War Scare as published on the CIA’s website:

The Soviet Union's early warning system, which relied on earthbound radar technology, was considerably more primitive than the United States' space-based version. This disparity gave the U.S. a theoretical advantage, as it had more reaction time in the event of a Soviet first strike, whereas the Soviets had to contend with a much narrower window for detecting and responding to an American missile launch. This imbalance fuelled deep paranoia within the Soviet high command, who insisted that any Soviet response to a U.S. missile attack must be instant, automatic, and overwhelming.

In September 1983, with nuclear tensions between the U.S. and the Soviet Union already at a critical level, the Soviet early warning system sounded the alarm: it had detected what appeared to be multiple American intercontinental ballistic missiles heading towards the USSR:

Stanislav Petrov was a Soviet army officer monitoring the satellite system for signs of a U.S. attack, the year was 1983, and his instructions, if he detected missiles targeting the Soviet Union, were to push the button and launch a counter-offensive.

He didn't. Minutes later, no missiles came; months later, the frightening data across his monitor was determined to have been a system glitch. Today, the Association of World Citizens is calling him "the forgotten hero of our time," a title befitting the man whose responsibility had been to start World War III.

Half an hour past midnight on September 26, 1983, he saw the first apparent launch on his computer monitor in a glass-walled room on the top floor of the Ballistic Missile Early Warning System (BMEWS) command and control post.

"I was supposed to supervise the combat crew. When the first launch happened, everyone was stupefied. After the first launch, I started giving orders, because in the room below, where there were five switchboards, and all the operators jumped out of their seats to see what my reaction was. I can only imagine what went on at the other posts."

The warning system was by now showing five missile launches in the U.S., headed toward the Soviet Union. The "START" command Petrov was expected to give would have started an irreversible chain reaction in a system geared to launch a counter-strike without human interference.

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"I just couldn't believe that just like that, all of a sudden, someone would hurl five missiles at us. Five missiles wouldn't wipe us out. The U.S. had not five, but a thousand missiles in battle readiness." It just didn't seem like any scenario considered by military intelligence before.

However, tensions reached an even more dangerous peak during NATO's Able Archer 83 military exercises, which simulated a nuclear strike on the Soviet Union. The Soviets, believing the exercise could be a prelude to a real attack, were deeply alarmed. President Reagan, initially unaware of the full extent of the Soviet fears, was eventually informed by high-level informants within the Soviet hierarchy about how these escalating actions were unsettling the Russian leadership.

To his credit, Reagan recognized the gravity of the situation and eventually chose to distance himself from the more hawkish advisors pushing to push Soviet red lines even higher. He took significant steps to de-escalate the situation, leading to his historic summit with Mikhail Gorbachev in Iceland, where they managed to bring geopolitical tensions back to a safer, more manageable level. This marked a crucial turning point in the Cold War, as both leaders began to lay the groundwork for a thaw in U.S.-Soviet relations.

The great tragedy of the 21st century is that, after the fall of the Soviet Union, the United States missed a crucial opportunity to integrate Russia into the Western fold, as it had successfully done with defeated Japan and Germany after World War II. Instead of fostering a partnership with a weakened Russia, the U.S. chose a path that many Russians perceived as humiliating. This approach included the bombing of Serbia, a traditional Russian ally, into submission during the Kosovo conflict, and direct interventions in former Soviet satellites like Ukraine and Georgia. These actions deepened the divide between Russia and the West, sowing the seeds for the renewed tensions playing out on the battlefield today.

Had the U.S. resisted offshoring its industrial base to China and instead fostered a deeper economic partnership with Russia, leveraging Europe's demand for abundant Russian resources, the global alignment today could indeed look very different. Such an approach might have precluded the emergence of a powerful anti-hegemonic alliance between Russia, China, and Iran—an alliance that now poses a significant challenge to America's global influence. By integrating Russia into the Western economic fold, the U.S. and Europe could have potentially stabilized relations with Moscow, preventing it from gravitating towards Beijing and Tehran. This would have created a more balanced global power structure, reducing the impetus for these nations to unite against Western hegemony. Instead, the current geopolitical landscape sees these three powers increasingly coordinating their efforts to counterbalance U.S. dominance, threatening the established international order.

Blocking Ukraine’s Assault on Russian Red Lines

Geopolitical tensions inevitably ebb and flow, but pushing those tensions to the limit—”taching out” geopolitical RPMs past an adversary's red lines—puts the world in a dangerous zone where a single unlucky event could trigger Armageddon. In 1983, the world narrowly avoided such a catastrophe, thanks to sheer chance that the right man was at the right place.

In warfare, emotions naturally run high, especially among those who see themselves as victims. Early in the conflict, the U.S. encouraged messianic narratives, and many Ukrainians fought and died believing their sacrifice would preserve their nation's independence. Given such heroism, it's difficult to curb Ukrainian ambitions. However, it appears that Ukraine's incursion into Kursk has crossed U.S. red lines to an intolerable degree. Shortly after the invasion began, U.S. and German intelligence officially accused Ukraine of the Nord Stream attack. Now, as Ukrainian losses mount, the opposition Ukrainian Telegram channel Rezident reports that the U.S. is practically ordering Ukraine to withdraw from Kursk.

As of today, Zelensky continues to refuse ending his ill-fated venture, instead committing more reserves and Western-supplied equipment into the quagmire of Kursk. The U.S. demand for a withdrawal is essentially a thinly veiled break-up letter from the West to Zelensky. Once the critical logistics hub of Pokrovsk in the Donbass falls to Russian forces, Western assistance to Ukraine is likely to cease. This threat from the U.S. acts as a geopolitical "rev limiter," designed to prevent the situation from escalating into a full-blown crisis.

In automotive terms, a rev limiter is a device installed to prevent engines from over-revving and surpassing red lines. Similarly, the U.S.'s implied threat to "ghost" Ukraine serves as a mechanism to avoid allowing Kiev to push geopolitical tensions into the red zone.

For over a decade in Syria, the U.S. and Russia have managed an uneasy coexistence, where their militaries operate in close proximity yet avoid significant direct clashes. Recently, the U.S. foreign policy establishment appears to be moving towards policies aimed at an eventual reduction of tensions with Russia.

Russia also has no interest in letting tensions escalate uncontrollably. In the mid-term, both Russia and China aim to draw European nations into the BRICS+ trade association, thereby fostering Eurasian economic integration. On the periphery of Europe, Turkey has officially applied to join BRICS+, and it's conceivable that countries like Hungary, Serbia, Slovakia, and even Austria could follow in the first wave of European integration into this bloc. Additionally, one of Russia's primary, albeit unstated, objectives in the current conflict is to secure post-war Ukraine's alignment with the BRICS+ association.