Putin threatens "Caribbean Crisis"

As you may know, the United States and Germany have agreed that the United States will begin deploying long-range missiles on German territory as early as 2026 to demonstrate that the United States is ready to further develop NATO's security on the European continent.

In his speech on Sunday, Putin stressed that by doing so, the United States risks provoking a real Cold War-style missile crisis. The flight time to targets on Russian territory for such missiles, which could even be equipped with nuclear warheads in the future, would be about 10 minutes, Putin warned. He said that Russia would take mirror measures to deploy its own missiles and take into account the actions of the United States and its allies.

Putin said that Russia could even resume production of shorter and medium-range missiles capable of using nuclear warheads, and compared the US actions to NATO members' decisions to deploy Pershing II missile launchers in Western Europe in 1979. As is well known, for the Soviet leadership, the deployment of such missiles was a real existential challenge and led to one of the most serious eras of confrontation in the history of the Cold War.

Today, Putin is confidently scaring the US with a new Cuban Missile Crisis. That is, a situation that, in the days of the then First Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee Nikita Khrushchev and US President John F. Kennedy, almost led to the outbreak of World War III, as the participants and witnesses themselves admit.

However, at that time in the Soviet Union, Nikita Khrushchev was not just a leader who made decisions that were fundamental to his country's foreign policy, but also a member of the collective leadership - the Presidium of the CPSU Central Committee. And it was with the members of the Presidium, who were not all satisfied with Khrushchev's adventurous steps to deploy Soviet missiles in Cuba, that the then First Secretary of the Communist Party Central Committee had to coordinate his principled actions, including the response to the ultimatum of US President John F. Kennedy.

In the end, the crisis was resolved precisely because the Presidium of the CPSU Central Committee realised the danger of further escalation of the Soviet-American conflict.

Unlike Nikita Khrushchev, Putin is not burdened with collective leadership. He makes all the fundamental decisions for Russia's future on his own, and his associates exist solely to agree with the conclusions of the Russian president. Therefore, if he wants, Putin can single-handedly drag Russia into a nuclear conflict with the United States, and even more so - into World War III.

And, as we can see, when it comes to confrontation with the Americans, Ukraine is not the main arena for such a confrontation with regard to Putin's intentions. The war with Ukraine is an important episode - but only an episode in the confrontation between the Russian political and military leadership and Western countries, and the United States in particular.

But Ukraine is also important.

In the context of this speech that Putin made to Russian sailors, one can understand why he needs to control the territory of a neighbouring state so much. And why he would like Russia to decide what Ukraine's foreign policy course will be, even if Russia fails to occupy all of Ukraine's territory and begin the process of its gradual annexation. For Putin, Ukraine is first and foremost a territory where, like Belarus, missiles armed with nuclear warheads can be deployed, scaring the United States of an imminent conflict in Europe.

And the more such missiles there are on Ukrainian territory, the more confident Putin will be that the United States will abandon its own plans to deploy missiles in Germany and other European NATO member states.This is a fairly simple ambition - to restore the military-technical capabilities of the Soviet Union to the level of 1991, and not just the borders of the USSR.

What does Putin have now to resist the plans of the United States, Germany and other NATO member states? The territory of the Republic of Belarus, which, by the way, was actually controlled only after 2020, when the ruler of this country, Alexander Lukashenko, as a result of a conflict with his own people, practically lost the ability to resist any of Putin's militaristic plans and agreed to both the use of his country's territory to attack a neighbouring country and the deployment of nuclear weapons on the territory of the Republic of Belarus.

And then there is the territory of the Kaliningrad region of the Russian Federation, which is almost entirely surrounded by the territories of NATO member states Poland and Lithuania. And Putin has no other such obvious foothold for the deployment of Russian missiles and for the deployment of Russian troops directed against European states.

The distance does not seem to him as daunting for the US European allies as it was in Soviet times. Therefore, we are talking about the return of the Soviet-era security infrastructure, when Moscow could frighten Western European countries with its own nuclear-capable missiles. This is part of Putin's militaristic plans for the future. It is these plans that make him hope for the continuation of hostilities against Ukraine even when Russian troops cannot move across Ukrainian territory and Putin's plans for the rapid occupation of the neighbouring state have remained unrealised for 2.5 years in a row.

However, Putin's threats, as we can see, are always reduced not so much to the movement of his troops as to the use of missile technology, and such technology can be equipped with nuclear warheads. It is the possibility of a nuclear conflict that remains Putin's most important trump card, with which he wants to intimidate the West and dissuade the United States from deploying its own missile technology in European countries and from supporting former Soviet republics in their efforts to defend their sovereignty and political choices from Russian imperial encroachment.

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About the author. Vitaly Portnikov, journalist, winner of the Shevchenko National Prize of Ukraine

The editors do not always share the opinions expressed by the blog authors.