Ukraine is presently bracing for Russian retaliation after firing American-made and supplied missiles—Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS)—into Russia on Monday. It wasted no time in doing so after President Joe Biden eased restrictions over the weekend on Ukraine’s use of the U.S.-supplied missiles to strike targets deep inside Russian terrains he United Kingdom followed suit by granting Kyiv permission to use its long-range Storm Shadow missiles on Wednesday. This has prompted the U.S., Spanish, Italian, and Greek embassies in Kyiv to close their doors as there were indications Russia was poised to launch a possible ‘significant air attack’ on Ukraine.

What is Potentially Behind Biden’s Approval?

One wonders why would President Biden, being that he has just two months left in his term, would authorize the firing of the ATACMS deep into Russian territory? There are various answers to that, and preserving so-called democracy in Ukraine is definitely not the answer—Ukraine is a grain hub and there are vast financial interests to be exploited, but that is another story for another time.

The first reason would be, knowing that the incoming Trump administration’s reticence to continue supplying arms to the Ukrainians, to show that he did everything in his power to ensure a Ukrainian victory, even though he never spelled what victory would entail.

Second, and this is mere hindsight, the fact that the Ukrainians are both stretched out and exhausted, foreseeing their eventual defeat on the battlefield to the Russians, the use of ATACMS will extend the war into next year, at least until when Donald Trump takes over the reins in Washington. The new president would thus be historically blamed for losing Ukraine to our old Soviet adversary. This would a ‘tit for tat’ after Biden’s disastrous exit from Afghanistan, which was paved by then President Trump when he negotiated with the Taliban terrorists to retake power in Kabul, excluding the legitimate Afghan government in the process. In other words, Biden can say to Trump: ‘You left me with a mess, now I will leave you with a mess.’

A Nuclear Armageddon?

President Vladimir Putin, immediately after Ukrainians forces fired the ATACMS, as expected, officially lowered the threshold for using nuclear weapons, which Moscow can now claim its need for a potential nuclear response. Naturally, with headlines, such as ‘Putin clears way for nuclear strike’ or ‘Putin issues new nuclear doctrine in warning to the West over Ukraine’, there is all of a sudden fear of nuclear Armageddon. Even China reacted with concern:

‘Under the current situation, all relevant parties need to remain calm and restrained and jointly seek de-escalation and lower strategic risks through dialogue and consultation.’

Russia had been warning the West for months that if Washington allowed Ukraine to fire U.S., British, and French missiles deep into Russia, it would consider those NATO members to be directly involved in the war in Ukraine. Nevertheless, Putin is intelligent enough to know that the use of nuclear weapons against his NATO opponents is out of the question. He may eventually bomb those sites in NATO countries if they are launching missiles into Russian territory.

And, assuming a worst case scenario, Putin drops an atomic bomb in Ukraine, which he may have seriously contemplated when the Ukrainians had the upper hand in 2022, it is not as if the U.S./NATO member states will retaliate with nuclear arsenal. Ukraine, not to be cynical, is simply not worth being incinerated for, especially since it is not part of the Northern Alliance.

Putin will wait this one out, at least for the next two months.

How Will it End?

As I explained in a previous article, there is no way the Ukrainians are going to win this war. As U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin stressed a couple of months ago, no specific weapon will change the tide of the war in Ukraine’s favour. Not to mention that, as stipulated by Yulia Kazdobina, political analyst and Senior Fellow at the Ukrainian think tank Prism, the U.S. has restricted Ukraine’s strikes of its ATACMS to the Russian Kursk region which Ukrainian forces invaded in August.

Russian forces are accelerating their gains along the front line in Ukraine at a crucial time for the conflict. Data from the Institute for the Study of War shows that the Russians have gained almost six times as much territory in 2024 as they did in 2023, and they are advancing towards key Ukrainian logistical hubs in the eastern Donbas region. At the same time, in what is now being called as a ‘strategic catastrophe’, Kyiv’s surprise incursion into the aforementioned Kursk region is faltering. Ukraine’s manpower has become less and less as Russian troops have pushed their offensive backwards.

President-elect Trump vowed he would end the war within 24 hours, even before he is sworn in as the 47th President of the United States. Aside the fancifulness of this, he has publicly rejected President Putin’s two essential requirements to just initiate negotiations for a peaceful ceasefire. The first is that the four eastern Ukrainian oblasts now under Russian control, plus Crimea, ar to be permanently part of the Russian Federation. Second, Ukraine must publicly agree that it will never be part of NATO—this is also unacceptable to President Zelensky.

Trump, even though he said he want to end this war, would have to give into Putin’s demands in order to do so, at least at this point in juncture. This is something he will most definitely not do, more so with the belligerent attitudes of the neo-conservative hawks in his administration, like Secretary of State nominee Marco Rubio or Secretary of Defense nominee Pete Hegseth. Keep in mind that Putin is in the driver’s seat. Thus, the most probable outcome, unless if Kyiv halts the fighting now, would then be a frozen conflict devoid of a peaceful and meaningful ceasefire, by which Ukraine will become an economic and politically dysfunctional rump state, which in reality it has already become.

The views expressed by our guest authors are theirs and do not necessarily represent the views of Hungarian Conservative.

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