Ukraine Escalation?

Over the weekend, there was a flurry of posts suggesting pro-war diehards were going to try to force an escalation in Ukraine that would give Trump no choice but to continue the war, which he's asserted he can quickly end once he's in office. For instance,

With around 50 days remaining to stir up as much trouble as possible, and with around 50 days of strategic activity left in order to Trump-proof the UE coalition of the NATO alliance, the U.K and France are in “classified” discussions about sending their troops into Ukraine before President Trump takes office.

Or this:

According to the New York Times, US and European officials have discussed a range of options they believe will deter Russia from taking more Ukrainian territory, including providing Kiev with nuclear weapons. The outlet reports that Western officials believe the Kremlin will not significantly escalate the war before Donald Trump is sworn in as President in January.

Following the election of Trump earlier this month, the US and its NATO allies began taking steps to rush weapons to Ukraine and give Kiev the ability to strike targets inside Russian territory with long-range weapons.

The problem is that Putin is already escalating in response to the West's own escalation:

Russia has a stock of powerful new missiles "ready to be used", President Vladimir Putin has said, a day after his country fired a new ballistic missile at the Ukrainian city of Dnipro.

In an unscheduled TV address, the Russian leader said the Oreshnik missile could not be intercepted and promised to carry out more tests, including in "combat conditions".

Russia's use of the Oreshnik capped a week of escalation in the war that also saw Ukraine fire US and British missiles into Russia for the first time.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky called for world leaders to give a "serious response" so that Putin "feels the real consequences of his actions".

Elsewhere,

Russia’s use of the weapon comes amid intense fighting between the two sides and after the U.S. authorized Ukraine to use sophisticated weapons to strike targets located further inside Russian territory.

President Joe Biden reversed his ban on Kyiv using high-precision Army Tactical Missile Systems, or ATACMS, to strike deeper inside Russia after revelations that Moscow escalated the conflict by deploying North Korean troops. Some 10,000 troops from North Korea are now believed to be fighting on behalf of Russia.

. . . Former Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward detailed in his recent book “War” that the U.S. had intelligence pointing to “highly sensitive, credible conversations inside the Kremlin” that Putin was seriously considering nuclear weapons and scrambled at the last minute to deter it.

NATO will now hold an emergency meeting with Ukraine at its headquarters in Brussels on Tuesday to discuss the situation. The alliance confirmed that at Kyiv’s request, the NATO Ukraine Council will convene.

Any negotiation with Trump will have to consider Putin's current objectives, which are generally those with which he began the invasion of Ukraine in 2022:

In the first detailed reporting of what President Putin would accept in any deal brokered by Trump, the five current and former Russian officials said the Kremlin could broadly agree to freeze the conflict along the front lines.

There may be room for negotiation over the precise carve-up of the four eastern regions of Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson, according to three of the people who all requested anonymity to discuss sensitive matters.

While Moscow claims the four regions as wholly part of Russia, defended by the country's nuclear umbrella, its forces on the ground control 70-80% of the territory with about 26,000 square km still held by Ukrainian troops, open-source data on the front line shows. Russia may also be open to withdrawing from the relatively small patches of territory it holds in the Kharkiv and Mykolaiv regions, in the north and south of Ukraine, two of the officials said.

. . . Two of the sources said outgoing U.S. President Joe Biden's decision to allow Ukraine to fire American ATACMS missiles deep into Russia could complicate and delay any settlement - and stiffen Moscow's demands as hardliners push for a bigger chunk of Ukraine. On Tuesday, Kyiv used the missiles to strike Russian territory for the first time, according to Moscow which decried the move as a major escalation. If no ceasefire is agreed, the two sources said, then Russia will fight on.

"Putin has already said that freezing the conflict will not work in any way," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told Reuters hours before the Russians reported the ATACMS strikes. "And the missile authorisation is a very dangerous escalation on the part of the United States."

This strongly implies that Putin won't accept any sort of NATO-leaning government in Kyiv. I don't think this is an unreasonable position, considering the Maidan Revolution of 2014, which prompted the first Russian invasion of that year, appears to have been organized by US neoconservatives in the Obama State Department. An eventual settlement will need to accommodate the concern that the US will continue to stir up this sort of trouble.

For now, though, the escalation stories are takiong a holiday break. The best anyone can surmise is that as Trump's inauguration gets closer, Biden has diminishing credibility, while Trump is beginning to make his intentions clear. He's already beginning to outline what is post-January 20 policies will be:

🚨 🚨 🚨 pic.twitter.com/qwPmIpDqrQ

— Trump War Room (@TrumpWarRoom) November 25, 2024

This gives Biden less anmd less room for last-minute maneuver.