High Alert.

Ukraine: News, analysis and commentary.

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1. Financial Times:

Vladimir Putin put Russia’s nuclear forces on high alert during a fourth day of bloody fighting in Ukraine on Sunday as the west stepped up its efforts to punish Moscow for starting Europe’s biggest military offensive since 1945.

Putin’s move came after US and western allies agreed to impose sanctions on the Russian central bank and eject a group of the country’s lenders from the Swift messaging system — which is crucial for global payments — in some of the toughest such measures taken against a G20 economy.

Nato and the US condemned Moscow’s decision, which the Biden administration described as a “totally unacceptable” escalation.

“It is clearly potentially putting at play forces that, if there’s a miscalculation, could make things much, much more dangerous,” said a senior US defense official.

The Pentagon declined to say if it had altered its nuclear posture in response to the move by Putin. (Source: ft.com, italic emphasis added)

2. Niall Ferguson:

Let us have no illusions. Though the Ukrainian resistance to the Russian invasion is heroic — and the pitch-perfect war leadership of President Volodymyr Zelenskiy deeply impressive — there is very little chance as things stand that Putin can lose this war. His forces may have encountered more effective opposition than they expected, and they have certainly suffered much greater losses than Putin foresaw, but the Russians retain overwhelming superiority. If the Blitzkrieg fails, they can switch to pure Blitz, bombarding Ukraine into submission.

Kyiv has held out bravely. If the Ukrainians’ struggle for independence and freedom does not move you, then you have forgotten what it is to be an American. But no, wars are not won by Facebook posts, no matter how inspirational. There is every reason to fear a brutal Russian escalation that leaves multiple cities, including Kyiv, in ruins, and Zelenskiy dead or a captive.

No sanctions — not even the most stringent currently under discussion — can avert this outcome, any more than sanctions reversed the Iranian Revolution or forced the Soviets out of Afghanistan in 1979-80. In that sense, the current debate about the SWIFT global messaging and payment system is really a distraction. No amount of financial pain, whether it is inflicted on Putin personally, the Russian banks, the Russian central bank or the entire Russian population, can stop the bombardment of Kyiv. Even a ban on Western imports of Russian oil and natural gas — which remains highly unlikely, given the difficulty and cost of swiftly replacing those source of energy — would not deter Putin from pursuing his war by all means necessary to secure victory.

Putin is a student of history. He knows the fate that awaits Russian leaders who lose wars. We all recall what befell the last Romanov tsar, Nicholas II, who not only suffered defeat in World War I, but also lost the Russo-Japanese War in 1905, a defeat that triggered the first of two Russian Revolutions.

But another sobering case that Putin must ponder is the wretched fate of Nicholas I, who went to war with the Ottoman Empire in 1853 only to find Russia isolated and faced with an Anglo-French expedition to Crimea that culminated in the fall of Sevastopol. Though he died of pneumonia in 1855, it was said that the tsar refused treatment as the ignominy of losing the Crimean War was intolerable to him. 

This is why Putin has so drastically upped the ante on Sunday by condemning Western sanctions as “illegitimate” and placing Russia’s deterrence — i.e., nuclear — forces on “a special regime of duty.” The real point of this threat (a classic Cold War ploy) is to deter hawks in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization countries from contemplating a no-fly zone over Ukraine.

There are clearly serious risks of escalation here. Putin has gambled his life on this invasion. He will certainly not hesitate to sacrifice the lives of thousands if not millions of people if he believes it is the only way to preserve his own. The fact that there is already a live cyberwar that almost certainly involves NATO countries attacking Russian websites means that the conflict has already spilled over beyond the borders of Ukraine. (Source: bloomberg.com, italic emphasis added)

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