Russia has been striking civilian targets throughout Ukraine with ballistic missiles since the beginning of the war.
How is allowing Ukraine to use ATACMS on military targets in Russia an escalation?
How is allowing Ukraine to use ATACMS on military targets in Russia an escalation?
It is a very clear escalation in US/European involvement. Ukraine were prohibited from using long-range western weapons to attack targets inside Russia up until now.
I'm not saying if it's right or wrong.
But it's a very clear escalation in western 'participation'. Russia have for a long time been saying that such action would be tantamount to a NATO attack, and so everyone involved surely understands that this is an escalation in the NATO-Russia face-off.
They say this every time. When Obama sent non-lethal aid, they used the same line.
It is not that Ukraine are escalating the war by using long-range missiles. Of course Russia have been using them all along.
But it is a clear escalation in western 'participation' in the war.
From that follows the logical conclusion that it’s not the US’ or NATO’s job to “reply to constant attacks”, and instead getting involved in the conflict is just that — waging war against Russia.
Joining in on a war that you're not part of is a deliberate and calculated choice in the same manner starting a war is.
What exactly are we even arguing about? I think it's massively irresponsible of NATO to get involved in the war through military aid. Sanctions and humanitarian aid are one thing, but every single NATO member should have been involved in finding a peaceful way out of this conflict since 2010 or before.
If what you're saying is the opposite, that NATO should attack Russia with as much force as possible to "win the war" (that we have no business being part of in the first place), then I'll just call you crazy and move on. Enough brave soldiers have died on both sides, it's time to find a solution that ends the killing, not amplifies it.
Normally, if we show up at the flagpole at noon to confront each other, and you throw a punch, you have escalated things to a fistfight, and then my return punch is not an escalation. If I pull a knife, I have escalated things to a knife fight. We escalate from fist to knife to gun. Reciprocation - self defense - does not count.
The only way to torture the term into contextual use is to suggest that Russia is not firing rockets at NATO because Ukraine is not NATO, but NATO is firing rockets at Russia because all these missile systems are not Ukrainian, but NATO. This is Putin's framing, and it incorporates the idea that the missile systems are actually being manned but US & EU soldiers.
If you are not adopting that frame, "escalation" only really works if you explicitly define the context as a Great Powers proxy war with a potential nuclear endpoint, where Ukraine is stipulated for the sake of argument to have no agency.
My point: I think USSR (and Cuba) had a good reason to install those missiles. It wasn't an unprovoked action.
There is some analogy here for the Ukraine NATO situation.
Arguably, this would even be in Russia's favor, given its manpower advantage. But Ukraine might agree to it to stop civilian terror and power infrastructure attacks.
With all the backlash here, I feel like some kind of radical, but here is a BBC article from 2 DAYS AGO that basically says what I'm saying: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx2nrlq1840o
Although they miss out the bit about a media campaign, and so on, of course.
This is the BBC, pretty much the mouthpiece of the UK government.
And although they frame recent actions as trying to give Ukraine an advantage in any Trump negotiations with Russia, the truth is that these missiles will probably not advance Ukraine's military position, but will certainly change Europe and America's standing, possibly to the point of derailing any possibility of negotiation.
> Russia has set out “red lines” before. Some, including providing modern battle tanks and fighter jets to Ukraine, have since been crossed without triggering a direct war between Russia and Nato.
This is the latest of a long list of small, slow, racheting-up responses to unilateral Russian aggression. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_lines_in_the_Russo-Ukraini...
And no-one has been 'getting anything across to me', inferring that I'm 'not getting it'. They've been throwing incomplete or irrational arguments, like yours, or simply downvoting.
Sure there have been 'red lines' by Russia, and the US has continuously pushed across them.
But this one was also a US 'red line'. Consistent with keeping a proxy-war in-theater.
Why have they crossed it, now?
What do they hope it will achieve?
Most likely very little militarily.
But maybe quite a lot in shaping or constraining future US policy.
For the same reason they crossed all the others - continued Russian aggression.
Each expansion of US aid or reduction in restrictions on how that aid is utilized has followed logically from Russian actions. Obama started with non-lethal aid; we've initially balked at every single step since that before eventually going "ok, now it's warranted".
It's very clear the US is keeping responses small and incremental to take the wind out of Russian bluster about nuclear holocaust if they do this one more little thing to piss Putin off. It's also very clear the Russian "no don't send Javelins/HIMARS/Patriots/Abrams/MiGs/F-16s/ATACMS, we'll be very mad" has lost a lot of its potency.
And, backtracking, how aware have you been about the situation in Ukraine, or baltic sea infrastructure, in the past few months (even year), compared to the last week? Just a marginal increment, no doubt.
I'd first reject the use of the term "red line" entirely for the ATACMS situation.
"No, not ever" is a red line. The Russians love issuing these for other people, but it's embarassing when they're crossed without significant consequence.
"No, not now" is not a red line. The US tends to shy away from issuing them - one of Obama's biggest mistakes was proclaiming one in Syria and then looking a bit feckless when they violated it. (https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/the-president-bli...)
Letting Ukraine hit Russian territory with ATACMS is like the fourth or fifth expansion of how they're permitted to use that weapons system so far, as was giving them ATACMS in the first place after HIMARS (which saw a similar set of gradually reduced limitations; https://www.defensenews.com/land/2022/07/08/us-to-send-more-...).
> And, backtracking, how aware have you been about the situation in Ukraine, or baltic sea infrastructure, in the past few months (even year), compared to the last week? Just a marginal increment, no doubt.
I've closely followed the situation in Ukraine since Euromaidan.
No doubt, but the fact is the US told Ukraine they couldn't use ATACMS to target Russia, and now, they can.
And it's really more than an incremental change in US involvement in the war. The fact that Ukrainians are supposedly operating these weapons is almost incidental.
It would be silly to claim, that evening, that I violated my own red line by letting them have phone time after dinner.
You continue to mix up “not now” and “not ever”.
They said you may not use phones for social media. At all.
And then changed their mind.
No "too"
It is only that.
If Russia retreated behind its internationally recognized borders and returned Crimea today, Ukraine would stop attacking it today.
That tells you everything you need to know about who the aggressor and escalator is in this conflict.
Anything else is a Russian talking point in service to their trying to lose fewer troops while invading a neighboring country.
Which says nothing at all about the conflict being "a proxy war".
It exactly states that Biden might be stirring things up in anticipation of Trump sueing for a freeze.
Either way -- according the definition in Wikipedia, it is a proxy because one side is strongly supported by an external power. Sounds reasonable, and I can go with it (on at least a technical basis).
Where people go wrong (not saying you here) is when they accept the term "proxy war" and assume (or insinuate) that it means or supports the idea that Ukraine is simply a puppet state, not really fighting out of its own motivations.
I am not the OP, but I think your interpretation is not as obvious as you make it to be. This often leads to misunderstandings.
AFAIK military analysts use the term escalation as a morally neutral term. Escalation is anything that goes up on the 'scala' (= "ladder", the Latin root of the word). In this interpretation, D-Day would be an e_scala_tion (climbing up the ladder) simply because opening a new front means number_of_fronts_today > number_of_fronts_yesterday. In this interpretation, self-defense and escalation are not mutually exclusive.
Apparently, the term changed meaning. Many people now treat it the way you do (if I understand you correctly) as something associated with aggression. Therefore, they assume that when someone labels something like an escalation, they mean it is an act of aggression, unjustified, something you should not be allowed to do, and not morally neutral.
I am not saying you are wrong. I am just pointing out that when people talk about escalation, it is worth checking whether they mean the same escalation.
The question in this thread is more along the lines of "if the robber shouts 'fighting back is a red line!', should we avoid fighting back?"
The current war in Ukraine is a direct result of the international community not making much fuss when Russia, largely unopposed, took chunks of Moldova, Georgia, and Ukraine over the last few decades.
As with appeasing Hitler, we prioritized short-term quiet for longer-term encouragement of aggression.