The top takeaway isn’t that Ukraine might soon develop nukes, which it couldn’t make any progress on without Russia detecting it, but that Ukraine might soon build its own long-range ballistic missiles and thus lead to Russia compromising on its goal of demilitarizing Ukraine if it’s unable to stop this.
The Times sent tongues wagging after their report last week about a Ukrainian think tank’s proposal advising their country to accelerate the construction of crude nuclear weapons if Trump cuts off aid. This follows similar comments from Zelensky last month that he then swiftly backtracked and which were analyzed here. The Ukrainian Foreign Ministry denied any such intentions and Zelensky’s top advisor Mikhail Podoliak claimed that such a plan wouldn’t deter Russia even if it was successfully implemented.
The abovementioned developments were newsworthy in their own right, but it’s regrettable that other aspects of The Times’ report were drowned out by the sensationalism of this story. The present piece will therefore draw attention to three points that most folks might have missed if they didn’t read the original report and instead only relied on others to inform them of the gist about it. The significance of what was left out from this story will then be analyzed too since it’s arguably the most important part.
The first point that many missed is that the director of the think tank that produced the report claimed near the end of The Times’ article that his country is just six months away from producing its own long-range ballistic missiles, which could reach as far as 1,000 kilometers/621 miles. That could place Moscow in Ukraine’s crosshairs if such missiles are launched from west of the Dnieper or St. Petersburg if they’re launched from Chernigov Region. He might just be bluffing, but it’s still worth pointing out.
The second point is that the aforesaid director and the report’s author agreed that “should the US abandon Ukraine, Britain could honour its security obligation under the Budapest memorandum by helping Ukraine to develop a nuclear deterrent.” And finally, the author claimed that “the threshold for developing a nuclear rearmament programme would be Putin’s troops reaching the city of Pavlohrad”, after which Dnipro and Kharkov could then be captured by Russia before nukes are developed.
Pavlograd is only around 96 kilometers/60 miles from the front and directly on the highway between Pokrovsk, which Russia might soon lay siege to or capture, and Dnipro on that eponymous river’s banks. Unlike what he claimed about Kharkov, however, Russia’s capture of Pavlograd would actually make it easier to then lay siege to or capture nearby Zaporozhye to the south than that northern city. In any case, Russia’s victory in the impending Battle of Pokrovsk could lead to the collapse of the entire front.
To review, most news outlets that reported on this story didn’t mention that: 1) Ukraine claims to be just six months away from producing its own long-range ballistic missiles; 2) some in the country want the UK to help them rapidly develop nukes; and 3) they’re worried that the entire front might soon collapse. Whether any of this is true or not, it might be meant to pressure Trump into perpetuating or even escalating the conflict in order to avert Ukraine and the West’s supposedly impending strategic defeat.
Hellbound and Down 