The Ukrainian proxy war is much more dangerous than even the 1980s Afghan one was. The second-mentioned was also a US proxy war with the then-Soviet Union but Washington didn’t share intelligence with its Mujahideen allies at the time for attacking targets within that neighboring country itself like it just reportedly did with Kiev vis-à-vis the Soviet Union’s successor state of the Russian Federation.
Russia’s ongoing special military operation in Ukraine was commenced to ensure the integrity of its national security red lines in that former Soviet Republic in particular and in the region more broadly, but now the US risks crossing some of those exact same red lines by proxy. President Putin warned on 24 February when announcing the onset of this campaign that “the leading NATO countries are supporting the far-right nationalists and neo-Nazis in Ukraine, those who will never forgive the people of Crimea and Sevastopol for freely making a choice to reunite with Russia. They will undoubtedly try to bring war to Crimea just as they have done in Donbass, to kill innocent people just as members of the punitive units of Ukrainian nationalists and Hitler’s accomplices did during the Great Patriotic War.”
The US-led Western Mainstream Media (MSM) hitherto mocked these concerns as the paranoid delusions of a “madman”, yet now they themselves just proved that President Putin was right all along. Both The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) and the New York Times (NYT) reported that the US’ latest tranche of military aid to Kiev includes intelligence for attacking targets in Crimea, which Russia considers to have democratically reunified with it in 2014 while Kiev and its US-led Western allies regard it as a so-called “illegal occupation”. The exact scenario that President Putin warned about – NATO-backed Kiev attacking Russian-reunified Crimea and thus risking a larger war – is now in the process of unfolding and might already have just happened after Kiev claimed credit for a fire on the Moskva missile cruiser in Sevastopol that Moscow says was actually caused by an accidental ammunition explosion.
Whatever the truth might be, there’s no doubt that Kiev feels emboldened by its latest tranche of US military aid to at the very least introduce an information warfare narrative alleging that the Moskva missile cruiser incident was supposedly caused by one of its own anti-ship missiles that – if their narrative is correct, which remains to be determined – might have hit their target due to this new US intelligence that it was reportedly promised to receive. This development represents the transformation of the Ukrainian Conflict from a US proxy war with Russia to a US proxy war on Russia seeing as how Crimea is officially regarded by Moscow and the vast majority of the peninsula’s inhabitants as an integral part of the federation. By at the very least promising to provide Kiev with intelligence for attacking targets there, the US is therefore using its partners as a proxy for attacking Russia itself.
In what probably wasn’t a coincidence, seven Russians were injured in a brazen helicopter attack from Ukraine on Thursday. It might very well speculatively be the case that not only has the US provided Kiev with intelligence for attacking targets in Crimea, but also within the universally uncontested pre-2014 European borders of Russia (remembering that Tokyo still challenges Moscow’s administration of the Southern Kurils despite the Kremlin considering this to be a non-issue). This military-strategic development is undeniably dangerous because it could provoke Russia into responding to these Ukrainian-emanating threats to its security in a much more forceful way that before, which could accelerate the destruction of that country’s infrastructure if Kiev doesn’t immediate desist from attacking sovereign Russian territory on behalf of its US-led NATO patrons.
The Ukrainian proxy war is therefore much more dangerous than even the 1980s Afghan one was. The second-mentioned was also a US proxy war with the then-Soviet Union but Washington didn’t share intelligence with its Mujahideen allies at the time for attacking targets within that neighboring country itself like it just reportedly did with Kiev vis-à-vis the Soviet Union’s successor state of the Russian Federation. There should be no doubt among observers that the Russian Armed Forces (RAF) will decisively defend their country’s territorial integrity and protect those civilians living in the borderland regions, but what nobody knows is the extent to which they’ll ramp up offensive operations in Ukraine to that end. That seems to be the scenario that the West wants to provoke in order to manipulate its optics for information warfare purposes but it could also end the conflict sooner rather than later too.