Politico cited unnamed officials to report that CIA chief John Ratcliffe’s unannounced trip to Russia was primarily meant to warn it against testing NATO’s resolve through unspecified kinetic actions against the Baltic States. This follows Russia’s CIA analogue warning in late May that their country is ready to retaliate against Latvia if it allows Ukraine to use its territory for launching drone attacks against Russia. The US then allegedly warned Poland in late June that Russia might be preparing provocations against it.
One month later in late July, a Russian cruise missile accidentally crossed into Poland, most likely due to electronic jamming. Viewed in a vacuum, this sequence of events lends credence to Politico’s report about Russia plotting to test NATO’s resolve, but the larger context debunks this. Since early this year, Ukrainian drones have transited through Baltic airspace to attack St. Petersburg, then the US and surprisingly also France launched a new Ukrainian-led “war of attrition” against Russia in mid-summer.
Although Zelensky’s 40-day influence operation as he called it backfired badly in Kharkov and Odessa Regions, it still inflicted tangible damage on Russia’s energy, logistical, and military infrastructure, all while the EU’s de facto German leader continued its rapid remilitarization just like the bloc as a whole did too. The lopsided dynamics of Russia’s aforesaid infrastructure being damaged while its EU rivals’ continue expanding is why “The EU Poses A Much More Credible Threat To Russia Than The Inverse”.
Be that as it may, while this observation prompted hawks like Sergey Karaganov to propose a Russian first strike against NATO (whether a low-scale conventional one at first or a large-scale nuclear strike right away), “Putin Powerfully Rebuffed The Hawks Who Want Him To Attack NATO” in early June. While he was forced to mildly “escalate to de-escalate” against Ukraine since mid-summer, Putin has no interest in attacking NATO, which would risk sparking precisely the uncontrollable escalation that he wants to avoid.
At the same time, former top Russian spy Andrey Bezrukov warned in June that the West aims to neutralize his country’s nuclear triad by proxy via Ukraine through what might ultimately end up being a several-decade-long “new war” against it, ergo the need to urgently restore deterrence. To that end, just like Putin was forced by mid-summer’s “war of attrition” into mildly “escalating to de-escalate” against Ukraine, so too might a future provocation from NATO itself force him to do the same against them.
Whether it comes from the Baltic States, Poland, a Ukrainian false flag launched from their territory, and/or some from somewhere else along the western front of the new “cordon sanitaire” that’s formed around Russia over the past year, Putin might authorize a kinetic response, even if only a mild one. He could have tested NATO’s resolve once its arms flowed into Ukraine right after the special operation began before the bloc consolidated but chose not to because he didn’t want to risk World War III.
It’s therefore arguably the case that any kinetic action by Russia against NATO would be in response to NATO testing Russia’s resolve and not Russia testing NATO’s by doing so unilaterally without provocation. Putin exercised such patience in the face of the bloc’s indirect provocations via Ukraine over the past 4.5 years that it was thought that he was prepared to turn Russia into the new “Christ of Nations”, but he might not be so patient in the face of direct provocations from them, so they should seriously reconsider.
