A veteran US general has cautioned that Vladimir Putin may turn to deploying nuclear weapons in Ukraine if he grows too desperate after disastrous combat setbacks.
Former Defense Attaché to Russia and retired US Army Brigadier General Kevin Ryan said Putin must be considering doing something extraordinary in the face of a quick Ukrainian counterattack that is still gaining momentum today.
Some believe that the battle has now reached a turning point since a sizable number of Russian forces chose to surrender rather than fight Ukrainian troops moving east out of Kharkiv.
Ryan cautioned that if Ukraine’s counteroffensive is successful, Putin may decide to use a nuclear weapon.
I’ve been considering the strain Putin must be under to take drastic action, which makes me reconsider nuclear triggers, Ryan said to Insider.
Ryan’s stern warning comes after Rose Gottemoeller, a former NATO commander, also expressed concerns that the Russian leader is willing to deploy nuclear weapons in Ukraine in an effort to intimidate Kiev into submission.
Gottemoeller, who served as the alliance’s deputy secretary general from 2016 to 2019, warned that after Ukraine humiliated Russian soldiers in the north, Moscow may “hit back in absolutely unanticipated ways.”
As a show of might, Ms. Gottemoeller said such attacks would include launching a nuclear bomb into the Black Sea or targeting a Ukrainian military facility.
The aim, she said, “would be to get the Ukrainians to submit in their dread.”
In the meanwhile, Ryan warned that “the violence that is presently taking place in Ukraine will suddenly be “in Russia”” if the Russian government holds a phoney referendum in the unlawfully acquired Luhansk and Donetsk provinces.
According to Ryan, there would be rapid repercussions if the districts in eastern Ukraine were forcibly annexed, as Russia did with Crimea.
Because all the conscripts (35+% of the army) may now be employed because there is no longer an external conflict, he said that Putin would be able to resolve his military personnel issue.
The red lines prohibiting fighting on Russian soil will unexpectedly be crossed, he continued, which is a second development. There will be warfare and shooting within Russia using NATO weaponry.
And perhaps most significantly, there will be a frontal assault on the Russian state. Additionally, as we are all aware, that is a reason to use nuclear weapons.
The pressure on Putin to take dramatic action will be tremendous, Ryan continued. “If we add the possibility that Russian forces may be losing hard-won territory to Ukrainian forces at the same time.”
However, Ms. Gottemoeller argued that Russia is unlikely to use long-range nuclear weapons against the US instead preferring to dissuade Western allies of Ukraine from supporting its military campaign.
‘I underline that if [the Russians] do go down that road then we should not retaliate in a nuclear fashion,’ she said when asked on the BBC’s Today Programme how the West should react.
“[We] should use our other significant capabilities to our advantage, whether that be a conventional [weapons] response or a cyber response.”
She emphasised the continuation of western military assistance and training for Ukraine while maintaining open diplomatic lines with the Kremlin.
She said, “We’ve done an outstanding job conveying a clear message to Moscow of: No impunity,” when asked what the West should be telling the Russian president.
We are aware of your plans, and you won’t get away with it.
“If there is a move toward WMDs, and I have not yet seen any sign that there is, but if there is, then we need to get the word out there and tell the Russians: “No impunity here.””
After Ukraine launched an unexpected counterattack from the city of Kharkiv, which caused Russian soldiers to be routed, Ms. Gottemoeller was speaking.
Ukrainian soldiers were able to completely expel Russia from the Kharkiv area after just a few days of warfare and only encountering marginal opposition.
Now that Kyiv’s forces are in charge of crucial supply routes into the eastern Donbas, they are attempting to increase their advantage by targeting Russian positions there.
The second counterattack on Kherson is also moving forward, and reports suggest that some Russian soldiers are reportedly discussing their surrender after running out of ammo.
President Zelensky’s advisor Oleksiy Arestovich said that there is not enough room to hold all of the Russians whom the military has recently seized.
Andrey Yusov, a spokesperson for military intelligence, claimed that “substantial” numbers of Russian officers are among them.
In a late-night speech on Tuesday, Zelensky claimed that Ukraine’s soldiers had taken control of a total of 3,100 square miles in the Kharkiv region’s northeast.
In order to assist secure the gains, Zelensky is urging Western friends to provide additional armaments, which is about the size of the island of Crete.
He emphasised the need for Ukraine and the West to “strengthen cooperation to resist Russian terror” and especially urged the use of air defence systems to assist safeguard civilian areas that Putin’s generals have started to target as “revenge.”
“A symbol of the desperation of people who manufactured this conflict,” Zelensky said of the attacks.
This is how they respond, he said, to the Russian forces’ loss in the Kharkiv area. Because they are unable to harm our soldiers on the front lines, Russia is targeting civilian infrastructure with their heinous attacks.
Ukrainian army have reclaimed dozens of towns since Moscow abandoned its major stronghold in the northeast on Saturday, marking its greatest loss since the beginning of the conflict. This is a startling change in the momentum of the battlefield.
Hanna Malyar, Ukraine’s deputy defence minister, said that 150,000 people had been freed from Russian domination in the region while speaking in the town’s main plaza. Balakliia is a vital military supply centre that was captured by Ukrainian troops late last week.
On the way to Balakliia, which is located 46 miles southeast of Kharkiv, Malyar said, “The goal is to free the Kharkiv area and beyond – all the lands controlled by the Russian Federation.”
Along the road to Balakliia, which was strewn with burned-out cars and demolished military equipment, groups of Ukrainian troops smoked, smiled, and spoke.
People clamoured for supplies and spoke about what they had been through as the Ukrainian flag was once again flying in the city.
Mariya Tymofiyeva, a 43-year-old local, said with a shaking voice, “I was going away… when I saw an armoured personnel carrier come into the plaza with a Ukrainian flag: my heart simply seized up and I started to sob.”
Oleh Syehubov, the regional governor of Kharkiv, said investigators were attempting to document crimes perpetrated by Russians while they were in the area and locate the remains of victims.
He said, “We are questioning everyone around about all the locations of burial that may be located.”
In the meanwhile, after Russian shelling caused blackouts, repair workers have restored the two major power lines feeding Kharkiv city and its surroundings, according to power company Ukrenergo.
As winter approaches, Kiev worries that Moscow will intensify its assaults on its energy networks and is appealing with the West for anti-aircraft equipment to safeguard infrastructure.
After Kyiv reported shooting one of the UAVs down on Tuesday, British defence intelligence claimed on Wednesday that Russia had likely utilised unmanned aerial vehicles produced in Iran for the first time in Ukraine.
It said in a routine report that “Russia is almost probably increasingly getting weapons from other strongly sanctioned regimes like Iran and North Korea as its own inventories shrink.”
The Ukrainian military’s general staff said on Wednesday that during the previous 24 hours, Russian troops had attacked military and civilian targets with three missile attacks, 33 air strikes, and 58 rocket artillery strikes.
In the south and east, Russian soldiers still hold a little more than a fifth of Ukraine, but Kiev is currently pushing forward in both regions.
Oleksiy Arestovych, a presidential advisor for Ukraine, hinted to the possibility of advancing on the eastern province of Luhansk, which combined with Donetsk makes up the Donbas, a significant industrial area close to the Russian border.
Arestovych said in a video uploaded to YouTube that “there is now an attack on Lyman and there may be an advance on Siversk.” For the village of Svatovo, where he said the Russians held store dumps, he foresaw a battle.
And that is what they dread the most,’ he said, referring to the twin towns that Russia captured in June and July after heavy combat, “that we take Lyman and then push on Lysychansk and Sievierodonetsk.”
Russian authorities are now encountering difficulties in other former Soviet countries on top of the failures in Ukraine.
The bloodiest violence between Azerbaijan and Armenia since a war in 2020 has claimed almost 100 lives this week, leading Putin to call for peace.
According to Russian news outlets reporting the Kyrgyz border agency, gunshots broke out on Wednesday between guards manning the Tajikistan-Kyrgyzstan border.
Writing by Grant McCool and Lincoln Feast; reporting by Tom Balmforth; additional reporting by Anna Voitenko and Reuters bureaux; editing by Himani Sarkar