Kyiv’s lightning invasion of Kursk in western Russia this month crossed the reddest of all red lines – a direct ground attack on Russia – yet Putin’s response so far has been strikingly passive and muted, in stark contrast to his rhetoric at the start of the war.
Ukraine is crossing Putin’s ‘red lines’ again, and he’s blinking, according to the headline of The Washington Post.
If the territorial integrity of Russia is threatened, we will use all means at our disposal to protect the Russian Federation and our people. This is not a bluff, he said earlier.
When Ukrainian drones struck Moscow in May 2023, crashing into the Kremlin dome and shutting down major airports, the roads made the problem less of a problem, analyst Tatyana Stanova wrote in an analysis for the Carnegie Endowment at the time.
For months, it seemed as if the Kremlin’s red lines either didn’t exist at all or had become extremely fluid.” The Kremlin claimed to be unfazed, she wrote, “even if that defied common sense.
Following the Ukrainian military’s attack on the Kursk region and occupation of large areas of territory, some in the West are questioning Washington’s strategy towards Ukraine: “slow, measured arms deliveries to Ukraine to avoid escalating tensions with Russia, which critics say has ruined Kyiv’s chances of ousting Russia and led to a war of attrition with mass casualties.”
Many analysts believe that US military aid policy to Ukraine should have been a shining example, but it has remained timid.
Ukraine’s invasion proved the Russians were bluffing, said Oleksandr Danylyuk, a former Ukrainian intelligence and defence official and now a research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, a London think tank.
This shuts out all the voices of pseudo-experts… the guys fighting escalation.
Source: Racurs
I am David Wyatt, a professional writer and journalist for Buna Times. I specialize in the world section of news coverage, where I bring to light stories and issues that affect us globally. As a graduate of Journalism, I have always had the passion to spread knowledge through writing.