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Putin Broadens Rules On Russia's Use Of Nuclear Arms
(www.barrons.com)
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this post was submitted on 19 Nov 2024
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A very dangerous moment.
This opens up the possibility that, when the next ATACMS are used against Russia, a nuclear response occurs. This was not legally possible before this change.
Whether they do it or not is still uncertain but I wouldn't want to test it. This is as close to the brink as I've ever seen things.
I think its probably intended to address the use of a M.O.A.B. or other large scale conventional armament, like Trump deployed in Afghanistan at the start of his first term. Eliminates the theory that Americans can just firebomb Tokyo or Dresden and pretend its fine because the wreckage isn't radioactive.
Everything I grew up with, learning about the background of the First World War, echoes this moment. Countries across Europe piling weapons atop each other as their leadership gets more and more eager to use them. Wilhelm doing parade marches with his toy soldier battalions. Tsar Nicholas adopting military dress as the imperial uniform. George V coming up through the royal navy and fascinating himself with British naval exploits.
This feels like a lot of the same. People drowning in their own military mythology, from DC to Paris to Moscow, all convinced another international conflict would leave them out in front of the pack. Everyone raising the stacks, because they think they've got a winning hand.
Was an actually good reason ever given for the use of that MOAB? My wild hunch is that Trump wanted to do something insane so the MIC distracted him with the biggest non-nuclear boom possible.
I remember someone in the military I knew trying to rationalize it by saying the ordinance was decades old and would have gone to waste if they hadn't dropped it on some guys in a cave, which would obviously be the bigger crime.
Oh, man. That's fantastic MIC logic. If we don't use it - it'll go stale.
Trump thought he could step into office and immediately win the war by being Mega Based Chad and doing the most Epic war thing imaginable shy of a mushroom cloud. Obviously it didn't work, because there was nothing the Afghans had that could justify using the weapon. But it made headlines, which was important for the Trump news cycle.
Putin is looking at a second Trump term and a guy like Pete Hegseth at the Pentagon, and likely thinking he doesn't want Trump to try the same trick twice. It may work, as Trump is typically savvy enough to know not to punch someone who can punch back.
Indeed, this is far beyond the Cuban missile crisis or Able Archer.
I disagree this is just simply underscoring the well known fact that any nuclear armed regime would not allow itself to be topped by an outside power in conventional warfare without using said nukes to defend itself.
Effectively this is nothing new to anyone making decisions at this scale. If any country thinks that they'd be able to conventionally topple a nuclear power without a nuclear response they have the worst military planners ever.
If we replayed Barbarossa with Stalin having nukes, he would have never let the blitz get to Stalingrad let alone cross the Dnipro or arguably the Dneister. Whether the nukes target the front or the enemy cities doesn't really matter in these scenarios because the reaction/overreaction would effectively be world ending anyway.
The reality is that at this point ATACMS aren't going to do much, even if Ukraine defies the US and uses them outside "Kursk" (which has been a lulzy explainer by DoD tbh since they shot at Bryansk) they still aren't going to do much to turn the tide except give the US realistic data on how rocket artillary works against Russian interceptors.
There's like 225 possible targets within range, and Ukraine has fewer than 50 ATACMS missiles.
https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/8b060c46ee6f49908f9fb415ad23051c
Also this is the response to the fact that Ukraine used ATACMS on Bryansk, which were shot down.
So this is just saber rattling/dunking on your enemy. Russia is basically saying, even if your wildest dreams of NAFO ATACMS FAFO SHIBE DOGE HIMARS GHOST OF KYIV were possible and you could march straight up to Moscow under the cover of all Western power projection capabilities, we'd still retaliate with nukes. They will not simply capitulate to moving the front to a less advantageous position for them, even if it was technically possible as it is in the magical thinking scenarios of Westerners.
I think you misunderstand the problem here. The real issue is that these types of long range missiles can carry a nuclear payload. If Russia detects that a bunch of nuclear capable missiles are flying to Russia then they have to make call on whether it is a genuine nuclear first strike or just a conventional weapons attack. Russia has to treat that as a nuclear strike because otherwise deterrence does not work. It would tell NATO they can just lob nuclear capable missiles into Russia without any response, and at some point they could lob nuclear missiles. That's what makes the whole situation so incredibly dangerous.
Dismissing this as sabre rattling is incredibly misguided.
There is no known nuclear warhead that exists for the MGM-140 tactical ballistic missile, and the idea that the US would give one to Ukraine, or that Ukraine could develop one is completely insane.
Only if you're pretending that doctrine is to respond to nuclear attacks with nuclear attacks immediately without any real information. For weapons that Ukraine fields the SOP would literally be the same. The MGM-140 can be shot down by multiple Russian SAM systems. Nuclear warheads don't make nuclear detonations unless they are triggered correctly. This isn't a video game red barrel.
Every missile above a certain size is "nuclear capable". This phrase doesn't mean anything. Any world where your explainer is correct hinges on multiple misunderstandings.
AFAIR NATO countries haven't ever fielded TCMBs with nuclear warheads on mobile land platforms due to the risk. Mobile land-based launch platforms for nuclear TCBMs is typically only fielded by Russia/Post-Soviet countries. NATO typically uses Air/Sea for these types of deployments due to the risks of land based mobile deployment.
Your entire line of reasoning is something that the US can simply accuse Russia of for using the Iskander platform, which it does in Ukraine, because it actually has known nuclear warheads.
Literally FTA
Furthermore see Erdogan's response that was highlighted by Russian state media:
https://tass.com/world/1874889
There are nuclear capable ATACMS variants, and there is no way to tell which one has been launched until it delivers the payload https://missilethreat.csis.org/missile/atacms/
That's literally how MAD works. Nobody's going to wait to find out if the attack was a nuclear first strike or not. The missiles will be launched in response to a perceived nuclear strike before it hits.
This whole notion that Russia is going to keep tolerating this sort of escalation is frankly bat shit insane. I urge you to consider how the US would react in a similar situation, say if there were strikes with weapons that have nuclear variants into US from Mexico.
There is no source for the nuclear version existing, Wikipedia has no source of a nuclear version existing. If a nuclear version of ATACMS exists it's literally a US state secret and multiple levels of insanity would have to be limit broken for it to end up on a HIMARS truck in Ukraine.
The source that CSIS references does not mention nuclear warheads.
https://web.archive.org/web/20161122100449/http://www.military-today.com/missiles/atacms.htm
We might as well be arguing about how you could also strap suitcase nukes to drones so Ukraine shouldn't use drones to attack Russia either. And we know those exist
So the country of Iran still existing literally disproves this. SCUD missiles which Iran has fired against Israel multiple times have known nuclear warhead designs. Again you are ascribing a level of insanity to Russian statements that would have been used immediately to crush the enemies of the US. Putin has literally softened prior criticisms of missile shields which mentioned the "whole technically they could nuke us." during the Ukraine war because he's not an idiot.
The reality is that the old nuclear framework with MAD has been destroyed by both the US and Russia for different reasons, and as such the reality is that nobody can consider ballistic missile launches a nuclear threat. Especially since the US in 2001 unilaterally withdrew from the ABM treaty, and Russia followed suit. Lobbing cruise and ballistic missiles at your opponent has been a common occurrence in the last 20 years from both nuclear and non-nuclear states.
Like I said if this is a real line of reasoning every Iskander used in the Ukraine theater is a reason for the US to go apeshit and say they're going to nuke the Ukranians, we should nuke them first.
Or how about how the Houthis used Tochka's on the Saudi coalition and US personelle, or the Syrian army using them in Syria. Or wait for it, how literally Ukranians used up all their Tochka's at the start of the Ukraine-Russia war bombing Russian air bases.. Some how they did this without triggering MAD.
The United States would level Mexico in an instant if they ordered too much shit off of Ali Baba at this point. No one is arguing that the US is a rational actor. Russia has been extremely rational and pragmatic in this war, and to ascribe the level of irrationality you're ascribing to them right now is to literally label them in the same way the Western propaganda has been labeling them but from a position of support. It literally undercuts your own argument. Is this a serious communique or not? Is Putin crazy or not?
Many levels of insanity have already been broken over the past two years if you haven't noticed. Biden himself stated that sending tanks and f16s to Ukraine would carry an unacceptable risk of escalation at the start of the war. Every red line the west has drawn for itself has been crossed. At this point, it's becoming clear that NATO is losing the war, and we're seeing increasingly desperate actions being taken.
We're arguing about the US firing long rang missiles potentially capable of nuclear payloads into Russia from Ukrainian territory.
The problem with this argument is that Iran is not known to posses nuclear weapons.
The destruction of treaties simply means that the risk of a nuclear exchange is much higher now. I strongly urge you to watch this interview with Theodore Postol explaining just how dangerous the current situation is. He's an actual expert on the subject. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RH7LT1bIdpY
If Russia launched Iskanders into US, then US absolutely would go ape shit.
Russia has been incredibly rational and restrained, however there comes a point where being restrained starts to look like a weakness. If Russia states red lines and then allows the west to cross these lines without consequence then it encourages further escalation. At some point Russia will be forced to retaliate to make a point. Russia unequivocally stated that there would be severe retaliation the first time the idea of deep strikes into Russia was brought up.
It is entirely likely that Russia will choose to wait a couple of months until the administration changes to see what happens. However, it's important to understand that we absolutely are on the brink of a nuclear holocaust here.
This is hilarious. The US would not need to do this. They could literally just bring up a Ohio class sub and launch a Trident tipped with MIRVs at Moscow from 4,700 miles away and it would be done with and there's be nothing that Russia could do to defend themselves, unlike a ATACMS which would be capable of being intercepted.
Nobody is going to believe that it's the Ukrainians fault that Russia got nuked dude, if the US wanted to Nuke Russia they could just fucking do it, who would stop them? Who would punish them? Standing behind Ukraine and doing it doesn't change the calculation for anyone.
There's no tangible benefits from this looney toons ass hypothetical plan where the US does a proxy nuclear strike with a weapon capable of only traveling 200 miles, can SAM intercepted, and has a limited utterly THEORETICAL payload.
You really have to be kidding me if you think the US is going to escalate to nukes via TBM instead of SLBM with a MIRV payload against another nuclear power who would immediately blame the US anyway.
The US does not need to do this, but this is literally what US is doing as we're speaking. This is happening, it's not a hypothetical. You're just making a straw man here that has nothing to do with what's actually being said to you. Nowhere did I suggest that US is going to try to hide behind Ukraine to do a nuclear strike on Russia. That's a scenario you made up.
What I actually said to you was that the US is firing nuclear capable missiles from the territory of Ukraine, and that if Russia does not respond that can be perceived as a sign of weakness and invite further escalation. Given that you yourself agree that US is unhinged, it should be obvious why this is a volatile situation.
Meanwhile, please explain to me what tangible benefit there was from the looney toons ass plans the US has pursued over the past two years. There's obviously been no rational plan here at any point in time. Why would we be expecting rational behavior from an actor that's proven itself to be utterly irrational?
Your arguing that this is the actually the plan?
That makes less sense than the US straight up nuking Russia.
The gamble always was that you can use idiot Ukranians to stall Russians to a point where Russia's logistical supply dwindled to the point that it could not practically rearm due to sanctions or economic collapse.
This is literally what they tried and were successful at doing to Assad.
There was never a military victory for Ukrainians.
I'm arguing that Russia cannot set a precedent that NATO can just shoot missiles into Russian territory. Surely it can't be that hard for to understand why Russia has to respond to this.
Except that they weren't even successful with Assad. Last I checked he's still in charge and Syria has not collapsed. Given that they couldn't even do it to a small and poor country there was no rational reason to believe it could ever work against Russia. The whole scheme was hare brained from the very start and could never work in practice. And this is my whole point, the US is not a rational actor that operating on an evidence based doctrine.
You are again changing your story to fit whatever your current line of argumentation is. You've been using Ukraine/US/NATO interchangeably and saying that's not what I said whenever I'm actually attempting to clarify your argument.
If Ukraine is NATO, then this makes no sense because Ukraine has been shooting ballistic missiles into Russia since the war became hot, Ukraine has no nukes, proliferating a nuke to Ukraine for an ATACMS ranged attack would be the dumbest shit ever.
If the US is NATO, then this makes no sense because the US can simply nuke Russia.
If NATO is NATO, this still makes no sense because by itself NATO doesn't own nukes.
The reality is that Russia has no choice, it cannot actually escalate in a sensible way that doesn't leave itself open for global retaliation if Ukraine shoots ballistic missiles inside the country. The only realistic way to read their communique is if we lose and you don't let us lose on our terms we'll use nukes.
The Syrian GDP is about a tenth of what it was. The Syrian civil war has sent Syria 45+ years into the past. Jordan and Syria have literally switched places economically, which one was a regional ally of the US again? Sure Assad is holding on by his teeth, but Syria is a ruined country, it's economy prior to the civil war was literally 1/4 oil and 1/4 agriculture, both were wiped out entirely by the war. Syria also used to be a regional banking capital thanks to Assad neoliberalizing the economy, and all that capital fled during the war.
The US has ruined and degraded Syria, neutralized its regional power, and turned it into a destabilized interzone. The only worse level that Syria can go to is Libya's. That's literally a win. That's literally, if done to Russia, what the US would describe as a "good outcome" of the Russia-Ukraine war, Putin doesn't have to abdicate, he can simply be drowned in problems that take decades if not centuries to resolve without external help.
And before we do the BRICS is singing the internationale of post socialist countries bullshit, China isn't going to loan money to a Russia that was defeated in that way, because it's a high risk / low reward outcome for them.
I'm not changing any story. If you go back to the start of the discussion then you'll see that it's the same thing I keep trying to explain to you over and over throughout this thread. Meanwhile, you just keep making straw man arguments instead of engaging with what I'm saying.
The realistic way to read this is that Russia could retaliate using nuclear weapons in Ukraine, and then the ball will be in NATO court where NATO has to decide if they want to escalate further towards a nuclear holocaust or back off. Both sides can play the escalation game.
Of course, Russia could also escalate asymmetrically, for example they could provide weapons to Yemen, Syria, and Iran that could shoot down stuff like F35s and get past AD. The US is incredibly exposed globally, and there are plenty of pressure points that Russia can exploit. This is the main reason I don't expect Russia to respond directly to strikes into its territory.
Yet, Syria is still a viable state and the US forces in the region are slowly being squeezed out. The point here was that the objective of getting a regime change in Syria failed. Again, if US couldn't even take down Syria, there was no hope of this working in Russia.
Meanwhile, you don't seem to understand the importance of Russia to China. Russia provides a shield in the west that prevents China being surrounded by NATO, and it provides China with the natural resources China needs meaning that it cannot be blockaded. These two factors make it vital to China that Russia stays stable and friendly to China. Which means there was absolutely no scenario where China could allow Russia to be defeated.
Yeah reading through this thread I'm getting very strong contrarian debatebro vibes from _pi. Constantly deflecting the topic of discussion and going on irrelevant tangents.
I wouldn't engage any further, this is just a waste of time.
lol yeah strong redditor vibes 😆
Damascus literally doesn't have on-demand electricity, it experiences blackouts daily. More than half the people of Syria are food insecure. 6+ million people have been displaced in the last decade. The fuck you mean viable state?
This conversation is just silly dude.
Are you claiming Syrian government is going to collapse in the foreseeable future, or you have some private definition of what a viable state is that you'd like to share with us here?
Yeah a viable state is capable of defending its borders, growing its economy, and developing quality of life for its citizens. Syria is failing on all 3 counts. Just because Assad can order people around doesn't make Syria a viable state.
Last I checked Syria is in a much better situation today than it was when US started trying to destabilize it. The economic situation is improving, and US presence there is not long for this world. Meanwhile, Assad has more popular support than any western regime leaders. If we apply your metric to the US then it's not a viable state either.
Damascus today literally has blackouts daily. The US started fucking with Syria after 9/11. The Syrian energy grid was gravely damaged in 2011.
Their GDP is not even hitting 2% growth by any realistic estimates, they're not releasing accurate data anyway. Some years in 2020-2024 the estimate of GDP growth is negative.
I mean, you should go to Damascus and try to express dissent against Assad.
This shit is silly dude.
You did not address the point I made which is that the situation has clearly improved. The fact that you can't even acknowledge this basic fact is astounding. Syria was on the verge of collapse with US backed extremists marching on Damascus. Today, the government is firmly in control of most of the territory and economy is stabilizing.
Same goes for Germany and most of the EU, what's your point here?
What point are you even trying to make here?
Yeah and you did not address the point I made which is the situation got gravely worse and is abjectly horrible
You love having a selective understanding of economics. Small underdeveloped economy, small percentage growth = very bad. Large global economy, small percentage growth = good. Remember how we were talking about global south markets in the other thread? What happened to all of that?
I was trying to make a joke, because attempting to qualify Assad support is the lulziest shit when he's effectively an absolute monarch of a ruin.
That's not the point being debated here. You claimed that Syria is not a viable state, and so far you haven't actually managed to defend that position.
I don't have a selective understanding of economics. Large global economy that was built on having cheap energy is now in serious trouble because it was cut off from it. Anybody who has a clue about economics would understand how dire the situation is for Germany. Their competitors now have much cheaper input costs, and companies are closing down and laying off people left and right as a result.
In fact, the global south markets are a big part of the reason why Germany is in trouble right now. Chinese companies are eating their lunch all over the world.
If you think those were real "red lines" then I've got a bridge to sell you. From the beginning of the war this was always going to slide into a proxy war because it suits the US geopolitical interests. The US was trying to finesse military exhaustion of Russia at the cost of Ukrainian blood from the beginning, they didn't "oopsie daisy" their way into the current position by crossing red lines. Biden lies about foreign policy every time he takes the podium my dude.
Nobody has ever thought that Ukraine would defeat Russia, they thought maybe Ukraine could exhaust Russia to a critical point where it would be incredibly difficult for them to rearm because of sanctions.
You're literally falling into simple US propaganda traps.
My point was that the US has shown that it is absolutely willing to keep escalating when backed into a corner. I'm not falling for any US propaganda traps, I'm just treating the US as a rabid dog that it obviously is.
There is no corner! There's literally not a corner. What is the corner here? How is America itself even losing? America the entity is literally winning because it's MIC is humming along, cash is getting transfered from the tax base to the oligarchs, and the only political argumentation about this is intranacine party politics which is also backstopped by a Western push to arm Ukraine.
Who is going to punish America? This is a heads I win tails you lose scenario for America. There is no losing, there is no corner. There's barely any blowback.
The US is losing geopolitically across the board now. We're seeing huge amounts of trade being redirected outside the dollar now as a direct result of the war. BRICS is growing by leaps and bounds. Middle East, Latin America, and Africa are becoming increasingly assertive. The whole empire is coming apart at the seams. All of this ties back to the war in Ukraine where the US overcommitted and that led to the economic war with Russia that is now turning into a bloc conflict between G7 and BRICS. The war was never about Ukraine itself.
The geopolitical losses that the US is experiencing in the economic and diplomatic sectors are entirely overblown hopium. Yes they're "bad outcomes" for the US, but the scale of these hits relative to the size and strength of the empire is not enough to make the case that the US is falling significantly faster than its overall imperial arc. It has nowhere near exhausted its options for bringing the globe to heel, and we haven't even gotten to a significant tipping point.
If these geopolitical losses were anywhere near significant you'd see a must faster escalation and scrambling to maintain dominance across the globe by the US. The reality is that if this isn't a slow burn it's going to be a precipitous fall and you shouldn't wish that on the globe given that this country has enough firepower stockpiled in the oceans to turn this planet to ash, and it's lead by the kind of people who will do that kind of thing, and spend their lives in bunkers ruling over the ash Enclave style.
It's absolutely not overblown copium. Huge amounts of trade are already happening outside the dollar, and China can obviously see they're the next target so they're redirecting their trade away from the west now as well. This should help you put things in perspective https://youtu.be/RQ3YjZAzqxA
The west has an over inflated view of itself. It's entirely possible that the managers of the empire still don't realize the amount of trouble they're in as well. Once again, you keep trying to treat US as a rational actor here which it demonstrably is not. There is vague realization that things are turning in China's favor, but there's still plenty of chauvnism to go around.
Also, I highly doubt that the oligarchs running the US really want to spend the rest of their days in a nuclear bunker. They'd much rather rule over a diminished empire.
There was Pershing Ia and Pershing II which had nuclear warheads, but they are no longer in service. They were stationed in Europe, West Germany in particular had a lot of mobile sites, mounted on MAN M1001 vehicles. Pershing II was a particularly scary missile as it had a MaRV (Maneuverable Re-entry Vehicle) back in the 1980s. It's basically the father of all modern tactical ballistic missiles. No air defence system from that time was intercepting that. Even the most sophisticated modern missile defence systems, such as Arrow 2 and Arrow 3 in Israel, still struggle to intercept MaRVs, as shown by Iran's October 1st retaliatory strike.
The reason we haven't seen this after 1991, and why the US and Russia have not focused much on short, medium and intermediate range ballistic missiles since then, is due to the INF treaty. However, the US withdrew from this treaty during 2018 and 2019.
The reason the INF was even signed is because these are the riskiest platforms to actually field and maintain, the INF still allowed sea and air launched short/intermediate ranged ballistic missiles.
The reason the US pulled out of the INF is because the idiot neocon policy under Trump lead to a statement like, "their test platform has wheels" when referring to Novator 9M729 development, and was used as an excuse for the US to exit the treaty with all allegations unproven.
Well yes, no one wants nuclear weapons stationed on their land border. It's an extremely high risk scenario. So both sides at the time could agree to take these weapons out of service. Banning sea launched nuclear weapons would be an impossibility given the existence of submarines, no side would willingly give up their second strike capabilities. And air launched ballistic missiles were not operational as of 1991, the US had only conducted a few experiments and the air launched version of what became the ATACMS programme was scrapped. The Kinzhal only became operational as of 2022. Nuclear air launched cruise missiles were not going to be banned, as that was important for both sides strategic bombers.
Ultimately the treaty was not going to last with only the US and Russia being members, it's gives a superpower like China a huge advantage in this field. Even a country like Iran has developed IRBMS/MRBMs which don't have a direct NATO or Russian counterpart currently in service. There's also the plans around the "NATO missile defense system" that basically killed the deal. If one side builds missile defences, the other side is going to look to construct weapons that can bypass them, to keep the playing field level. Any future treaty would have to ban the deployment or construction of certain advanced missile defence systems to be viable.
There's no known nuclear version of ATACMS, and even if we go by this logic Ukraine could also claim that they don't know if Russian Kh-101s carried by Tu-160 bombers (part of Russia's strategic nuclear forces) are nuclear armed or not, so they don't know if they're under nuclear attack or not.
The real issue with ATACMS missiles being used to attack Russian territory, as explained by Lavrov today and Putin earlier, is that it relies on US and NATO satellites for guidance, and US/NATO specialists to input attacking information and flight paths. So in essence, you have US military specialists and assets directly taking part in conducting strikes on Russian territory and military facilities within Russia. Something that didn't even happen during the cold war. That's what makes it a huge escalation.
Ukraine can claim whatever it likes, they're just a proxy. However, if Russia started lobbing Iskanders into Texas from Mexico then we'd be instantly in WW3 scenario. But yeah, NATO directly attacking Russia is the real escalation here.
This is a silly point, because it's just GPS. That's like saying the US is involved in every war that uses GPS technology.
This part is also arguable. From what I understand this could be true for the M39 Block I. But it's a weaker case for the M39A1 Block I, M48 QRU, and M57 Block IA Unitary because they have GPS capabilities.
There's also a real question of what's actually stopping the US from showing the Ukrainians how to program the internal navigation systems on ATACMS missiles. Are we really gonna argue that Ukranians who had/have one of the best technical service economies in Eastern Europe that provide IT services to US/EU companies cannot program internal navigation systems because understanding dead reckoning is too hard?
If these claims are 100% true then it would stand to reason that nobody who distrusts the US would buy ATACMS from the US because they'd be fully reliant on the US to even use the systems, which would not make sense for countries like UAE, Qatar, and Morocco, given they're not full US orbiters.
This is true regardless of those specialists being in Ukraine and is simply a technical change in how war works. The biggest thing the US provides Ukraine is its spying apparatus. Ukraine literally cannot get good field intelligence on troop movements without US satellites and intelligence.
While I do agree that the US has boots on the ground in Ukraine and it is a proxy war, and that escalation is a delicate dance and the Russians certainly have a lot of leeway here as the more powerful party, a lot of their complaints are often the same thing as RTS complaints about cheesing.
Russia at the end of the day thinks that Ukraine shouldn't be able to use ATACMS because Ukraine didn't launch it's own satellites and develop their own missiles, and blah blah blah. At what point is this simply complaining that Ukraine got free weapons from the West vs an actual argument about the balance of war from a country that in practice is shooting fish in a barrel? At what point can these complaints be levied against Soviet-era stock Tochka missiles that were expended at the beginning of the war? I think Russia just found a novel way to complain about this shit and is trying to make a case. If they believed the realpolitik of it they wouldn't be talking so much, they'd be escalating with their missile strikes to make it a desperate long shot losing proposition for the West to provide continued support. In essence I think this is a diplomacy tactic where Russia is trying to keep the rules of engagement on a level that they don't feel really pressed about. In short I don't think Russia even buys its own argument.
In practice HIMARS hasn't been as much of a boon to Ukraine as US/Russia is pretending it is. They have difficulty positioning them outside of Iskander range.
In practice the US doesn't give a shit about Ukraine, the only real point that has any value is that the US is expending US capital and Ukrainian blood to play geopolitical games with Russia. But let's not pretend that Russia gives a shit about the Ukrainian blood part, it simply gives a shit that the difficulty level on its game isn't on super easy.
Yeah that's the point. The most vicious of the Pro-Ukraine contingent have been clamoring for symmetry in the war: which means Ukraine's ability to rain fire on Moscow the way Russia can do on Kyiv. Now these people are practically idiots because it's not logistically possible with ATACMS, but in practice that is an escalation to the conditions of the war and Russia is defining how it would retaliate to that possibility.
That's the reality of war with regional powers, symmetry is in practice escalation. It's basic realpolitik.
Correct, ATACMS do not have the range to hit Moscow.