Armageddon

At no point since the Cuban missile crisis in the early sixties has the world moved so close to a nuclear conflagration.

Last week, US President Joe Biden, in his usual blunt manner, warned of a nuclear Armageddon should Russia use nuclear weapons against Ukraine. His own national security advisers were taken aback by the US President’s warning – even as it flows logically from the most recent turn of events.

Russian President Vladimir Putin is quickly running out of options in Ukraine. Over the past few weeks, his invading army has been pushed back in the battlefield by the more adept tactics of Ukraine’s generals.

As Putin signed a law annexing four regions of Ukraine, the Russian army was pushed away from the key logistics hub of Lyman in eastern Ukraine. Ukrainian military units rapidly retook occupied lands in southern Ukraine.

This weekend, as Putin celebrated his 70th birthday, a massive explosion damaged the 19-kilometer long bridge linking Crimea to the Russian mainland. Nothing could be more humiliating for Putin. He had this majestic bridge built mainly as a monument to himself after he had annexed the Crimean peninsula.

Since February, Putin has unleashed a long string of atrocities on Ukrainian civilians. His missiles bombed apartment buildings. His troops tortured and killed unarmed Ukrainians as evidenced by the mass graves discovered in areas formerly occupied by the Russian army. He reduced Mariupol to ruins. Yet, after his bridge was bombed, Putin found the gall to accuse Ukraine of resorting to “terrorism.”

Putting is tripping on his own shoelaces. As retaliation for the attack on his majestic bridge, Russian forces unleashed blockbuster bombs from strategic bombers on the city of Zaporizhzhia. He had just signed a decree declaring that city to be part of Russia.

Kyiv has not taken responsibility for the bombing of Putin’s bridge. That attack interrupts the resupply route supporting Russian occupation forces in southern Ukraine. That compounds the logistics problems plaguing Russia’s expeditionary forces. They have all the more become vulnerable to Ukraine’s powerful counteroffensive.

Putin’s generals have not found an antidote for the long string of Ukrainian battlefield successes. Exhausted and undersupplied, the occupation troops seem unwilling to give battle. It will take months for the new conscripts to be trained and deployed to the battlefield. Russian public opinion is beginning to turn against Putin’s war.

It is estimated that as many as 700,000 Russian men of fighting age have fled across the borders to evade Putin’s draft. They are escaping across all of Russia’s frontiers: to the Baltic states, to Kazakhstan and Georgia, to Mongolia and Turkey and even Alaska where two men sailed to US territory to seek asylum. This is not a vote of confidence on Putin’s leadership.

The Russian people have a history of deposing leaders who lose wars. After losing the Russo-Japanese War and then performing badly in the First World War, the Russians overthrew their tsar. After losing a grinding war in Afghanistan, the Soviet Union collapsed. Putin will not survive a humiliating defeat in Ukraine.

He knows this and therefore becomes more dangerous by the day. As his own political position becomes more precarious, Putin can resort to the use of nuclear weapons in the battlefield. No one is confident that his generals could restrain the desperate autocrat.

History offers us little consolation. Recall how the assassination of a duke in Sarajevo activated a web of military treaties and brought us to the First World War. When Hitler began annexing neighboring countries in the face of appeasement policies by the western powers, World War Two became an inevitability.

Contingency measure

Of course the democratic powers are preparing contingency measures for the possibility that Putin resorts to the use of nuclear weapons.

It is conceivable that the democracies could intercept nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles launched from afar. But it will be difficult, as we have seen in Zaporizhzhia last week, for existing defense technologies to stop hypersonic missiles launched from Russia strategic bombers. The lead time is simply too short for an effective response.

After the first nuclear warhead explodes over a Ukrainian city, what will be the response of the western powers?

No one really knows. A nuclear exchange is simply imponderable.

The whole world is now held hostage to Putin’s finger on the nuclear button. There is no precedent for this. All the dislocation of the past few years, caused by the pandemic and the energy blackmail, will be aggravated unimaginably by the escalation of the war in Ukraine.

Small countries such as the Philippines could do nothing to shape the course of the escalation in Ukraine. We could not even calculate the destruction that awaits all of us is such an eventuality.

Against an unbridled and increasingly tormented autocrat such as Putin, even international organizations such as the United Nations seem powerless. Autocracies are not impressed by international law. We saw that the past few days as North Korea’s Kim Jong-un fired ballistic missiles in quick succession, undeterred by the economic sanctions already imposed on his country.

Even if, over the next few days, Putin is somehow restrained from escalating in Ukraine, the world will still be threatened by over-armed autocrats. In the next few days, Xi Jinping is expected to be elected for a third term as China’s president. With all term limits lifted, he is being virtually anointed president-for-life.

Xi, along with Kim and Putin, complete a triumvirate of autocrats seemingly bent on keeping the world on war footing into the foreseeable future.