Putin’s humiliation opens door for deadly retaliation

Ukraine’s counteroffensive in the northeast is arguably Moscow’s biggest setback, but it raises fears Russia could resort to nuclear tactics.

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s forces were tricked into sending forces to the southern Kherson region to counter an expected Ukrainian campaign. Picture: AFP

The scale of Russia’s military collapse in the northeast of Ukraine has prompted celebrations in Kyiv but a wounded President Vladimir Putin is likely to be even more dangerous.

A lightning counteroffensive by the Ukrainian army has forced Russia to abandon key towns such as Izyum and Kupiansk in the Kharkiv region and amounts to arguably the biggest setback for Moscow in the war.

Ukraine has also seized a large number of Russian armoured vehicles and tanks. On Sunday General Valerii Zaluzhnyi, the Ukrainian commander-in-chief, said almost 3108km of territory had been recovered since the start of the month, a third of it in the past 24 hours.

Russia had been tricked into sending forces to the southern Kherson region to counter an expected Ukrainian campaign there.

A senior official in Kyiv said the Ukrainian army would seek to cripple the Kremlin’s war machine. “If Russia remains in the form it is, it is only a matter of time before it will be able to start another war,” Oleksiy Danilov, the head of Ukraine’s national security council, said.

Ukrainian soldiers load an abandoned Russian military vehicle on a trailer during the Ukrainian army counteroffensive in Kharkiv region. Picture: AFP

“Our task is to make Russia into the kind of country that does not have even the desire to think that it can attack its neighbours,” he told Voice of America radio. “Ukraine’s armed forces will halt [the counteroffensive] where our interests end and that will depend on many circumstances.”

The Russian city of Belgorod, 40km from the Kharkiv region, has been hit by several rocket attacks. Oleksiy Arestovych, a senior adviser to President Volodymyr Zelensky, tweeted at the weekend a mock-up of Ukrainian troops at the city’s borders.

Mr Danilov’s comments were likely to have been made with Kyiv’s western backers in mind, but any attempt by the Ukrainian army at a large-scale incursion into Russia would push the war into an even more dangerous phase.

Mr Putin said last year that Russia would use nuclear weapons if its sovereignty was threatened. He warned western countries in February that any attempt to intervene in the war would trigger “consequences greater than you have ever seen”. Days later he put Russia’s nuclear forces on high alert.

Margarita Simonyan, head of the Kremlin-backed RT media outlet, told television viewers recently that Russia would not hesitate to use nuclear weapons if it was facing defeat in Ukraine. Mr Putin could also launch massive cruise missile strikes on Kyiv – a move that hardliners have been urging for months.

Losing large parts of the Kharkiv region could accelerate in-fighting in Moscow. There are rumours that Sergei Shoigu, the defence minister, could be replaced.

Mr Putin has few good options now. The world must hope he does not choose the very worst of them.

The Times