Republished with permission from Lucian K. Truscott IV

Yesterday, Vladimir Putin warned that NATO and the United States will be “at war” with Russia if restrictions on the use of medium range missiles are lifted and Ukraine begins firing U.S. and British made missiles at military targets inside Russia. His warning, echoed immediately by the speaker of the Russian State Duma, seems intended as the kind of red line that Ukraine and the West have crossed repeatedly since Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

The Russian president has drawn one red line after another trying to prevent NATO and the U.S. from supplying Ukraine with increasingly deadly weapons in larger and larger quantities. He has even had his chief puppet, former Russian President Dimitry Medvedev, threaten the use of Russia’s nuclear arsenal against the west.

The war is in its 31^st month, and Russia has made no moves to use either tactical or nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles against Ukraine or western countries. It is well known that the Russian president, who in recent years spent somewhere between one billion and two billion dollars building a 200,000 square foot palace in Crimea, likes his luxuries and probably wouldn’t enjoy watching the Kremlin and his various homes and palaces wiped off the face of the earth by a nuclear world war.

In June, Putin drew another of his red lines when it became evident that Ukraine was using drones to conduct strikes on military targets such as weapons depots and concentrations of Russian reserves inside Russia. Putin said western nations were “playing with fire” by countenancing strikes by Ukraine into Russian territory. The event that seemed to set him off was a Ukrainian strike on a Russian S-300 anti-aircraft battery near Belgorod, just across the border with Ukraine. The strike came after President Biden gave the green light to Ukraine to use U.S. supplied weapons in strikes on Russian military targets. It was unknown at the time of the Belgorod strike what sort of U.S. weapon Ukraine had used, but it is probable that given the closeness of the Russian air defense battery to the border, it was a U.S.-made HIMARS rocket.

At the time of the first Ukrainian strike inside Russia, Putin complained that western nations were providing the satellite intelligence and GPS guidance data for use in targeting strikes inside Russia. He issued a warning in June that if the cross-border strikes continued, he would consider providing Russian weapons to other countries to carry out strikes on Western targets. In a briefing at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, Putin told reporters from international news organizations, “If someone considers it possible to supply such weapons to a combat zone to strike our territory and create problems for us, then why do we not have the right to supply our weapons of the same class to those regions of the world from which the strikes will be carried out on sensitive objects of those countries that do this in relation to Russia? That is, the answer may be symmetrical. We will think about it.”

Let’s stop right here and talk about Russia’s situation on the ground in Ukraine. Russia has been throwing human-wave attacks using recent conscripts to take a series of small villages in the Donbas region, concentrating its attacks on taking the strategically important town of Pokrovsk. I have discussed in previous columns the losses Russia suffered in taking the town of Avdiivka, and that was after the huge losses in men and materiel Russia took in conquering Bakhmut.

Now it has been revealed that Russia has had to turn to North Korea and Iran to resupply its stock of short and medium range missiles. Here’s the deal. Russia has used up so much of its arsenal of conventional weapons in Ukraine, Putin couldn’t even make a dent in supplying other nations with weapons to attack the West, so that’s a hollow threat. At least some of the weapons Russia has imported from North Korea don’t appear to be working. A photograph of a part of a North Korean missile found in Kyiv shows an unexploded section of the missile’s tail, here:

Photo: Conflict Armament Research via NY Times

Another photo published by the Times shows remnants of a motor used to guide a North Korean Hwasong-11 missile before impact, here:

Photo: Conflict Armament Research via NY Times

Missiles that explode on impact don’t leave intact chunks of their tails and guidance motors. The North Korean missile that left those unexploded pieces of itself on the ground in Kyiv was a dud.

So, if Russia has had to turn to North Korea and Iran for weapons to use against Ukraine—some of which seem to be duds—where is Vladimir Putin going to get the weapons he’s threatening to export to other countries to use against the U.S. and NATO nations? He’s already running out of ground-to-ground short range missiles he uses against Ukrainian forces in eastern and southern Ukraine. He’s already having to import North Korean-made half-assed missiles to use in Ukraine against civilian targets in Kyiv and other population centers. A fairly large piece of his own territory near Kursk is occupied by the Ukrainian army, and so far, Putin has not been able to dislodge them.

What sabers does Putin have left to rattle? Nukes? Putin has been threatening to use his nuclear weapons ever since the U.S. and NATO announced that they were supplying Ukraine with offensive weapons to use to defend themselves against the Russian invasion. Remember the kerfuffle about supplying Ukraine with Javelin anti-tank weapons in 2014 to defend itself against the Russian-backed militias that had taken and were holding a small slice of eastern Ukraine? A huge deal was made about how Javelins are “defensive” weapons in justifying their shipment to Ukraine, because the U.S. didn’t want to be seen as sending offensive weapons to Ukraine.

Well, those gloves came off in February of 2022 when Russia invaded and the U.S. and NATO began providing Ukraine with offensive arms and military intelligence that it could use to attack Russian forces.

Vladimir Putin is a classic paper tiger. He’s trying to rattle sabers he doesn’t have and making threats he can’t carry out. He spent six months trying to take the tiny village of Bakhmut, another six months wasting tens of thousands of soldiers and hundreds of armored vehicles taking Avdiivka, another small town that apart from its coke plant—that was destroyed by Russia—wasn’t much more than a crossroads in the middle of eastern Ukraine’s agricultural region.

Putin listened to his generals when they told him he could take Kyiv in five days, then he began firing a series of generals when they couldn’t push further into Eastern Ukraine and lost the battles for Kharkiv and Kherson. Now, apart from his push to take the rail hub of Pokrovsk, his army is stalled out defending a 600-mile front of World War I-style trenches and anti-tank barriers.

Putin and Russia have most of the Western world arrayed against them defending Ukraine. Other than shipments of missiles and drones and some artillery ammunition from heavily sanctioned countries such as North Korea and Iran, Putin has no friends and no prospects. He is depleting his military at a pace that his own defense industries cannot keep up with, and he’s having to kidnap and arrest conscripts to get them to fight in his military.

His nuclear weapons make him dangerous, but Russia has had those nukes since they stole the design for the atomic bomb from the U.S. in the Truman years. He’s like Khrushchev at the U.N. taking off his shoe and banging on the lectern screaming “we will bury you.”

Everybody knows how well that turned out for Russia, Vlad, including you. Next, please.