Putin’s Controlling the Escalation Management in Ukraine

Escalation management, according to a recent report by the Washington-based Atlantic Council and many frustrated Ukrainians, is the new appeasement, equivalent to then British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s infamous Munich agreement with Adolf Hitler. The analogy is misleading and, if taken literally, dangerously so.

Twenty-first century Russia simply isn’t 1938 Germany, a rising industrial and military power. At the same time, nor was Nazi Germany sitting on the world’s largest nuclear arsenal; indeed, nuclear weapons didn’t even exist when Chamberlain traded Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland for a promise of peace. To help Ukraine halt President Vladimir Putin’s invasion, without tripping into nuclear Armageddon, escalation management is essential. It’s just very hard to get right.

Critics of the Biden administration’s approach do have a point. While there are surely backchannel exchanges between the White House and Kremlin we don’t know about, Putin has too often been allowed to do the public management, defining what is or isn’t an escalation. The current clash over use of Iranian and NATO missiles is a good example of how that works.

Last week, Putin warned that NATO would be directly at war with Russia if it allowed US and European long-range missiles to be used against targets on Russian soil. This would, he said, change the entire nature of the conflict. The threat was more explicit than in the past and therefore concerning. But it’s also unconvincing — unless he chooses to do some actual escalation himself. It takes a little unpacking to explain why that is.

Putin made his threat to influence a US review of its ban against Ukraine firing longer-range NATO-made missiles at Russia. Reportedly, any change in US policy would affect only the Storm Shadow and Scalp cruise missiles that Britain and France have sent to Ukraine, leaving in place restrictions on American-made ATACMS, a truck-launched short-range ballistic missile, at least for now.

The administration’s rethink may have been prompted by Iran’s transfer of its new Fath-360, mobile short-range ballistic missile system to Russia. That’s something the US has been working to prevent for some time and now says took place in early September; Secretary of State Antony Blinken called it a “dramatic escalation” of Iran’s role. So would either the arrival of the Fath-360 or Ukraine’s use of Western-built missiles inside Russia “change everything?”

The first point to make is that Putin has been telling his nation that it’s at war the NATO for many months. Another is that while the risk of his launching a nuclear weapon exists, it remains distant. As I’ve written before, a nuclear strike would bring Russia few if any benefits, but major downsides. How a few hundred midrange, if sophisticated, conventional missiles are used doesn’t change those core risk-benefit calculations. Russia has already fired thousands of long-range missiles at Ukraine, many of them far more powerful than HIMARS and ATACMs.

Fundamentally, this isn’t the Cuban missile crisis because neither side has introduced any existential (or even game-changing) weapons to the field.

Storm Shadows, with a range of 250 kilometers (158 miles), would certainly allow Ukrainian forces to hit targets in Russia much faster than they can now with their own drones, but there are too few of these British cruise missiles available to change the course of the war enough that Putin would invite an actual war with the combined forces of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. This will remain true even if the US also lifts restrictions on Ukraine’s use of ATACMS.

That doesn’t mean there’s nothing to worry about. Russia is already waging a hybrid war against the West, and that could well escalate. From undersea telecoms cables to energy grids and pipelines, the developed West is a target-rich environment for any hostile actor.

The Fath-360 also would bring no categorical change to the battlefield Putin created with his invasion. The missile system is Iran’s answer to the US HIMARS, which have been operating in Ukraine since the late summer of 2022. The payload and range of the Fath-360 — at about 150 kilograms (330 pounds) and 120 kilometers, respectively — puts it somewhere between the variants of the HIMARS and ATACMS systems the US has give Kyiv for its self-defense.

Russia also already has its own versions of both US systems, called Tornado-S and Tochka-U. But for a number of reasons, these have struggled to make the same impact.

This is something Samuel Cranny-Evans, an associate fellow at the London-based Royal United Services Institute, has looked at closely. The Tornado-S looks much like the US M270, which is basically a double HIMARS, carrying 12 missiles instead of six. Similarly, the Tochka-U is rather like an ATACMs, a single larger missile on a truck. But in the critical areas of guidance and accuracy, the equivalence ends. The US versions can — unless jammed — maneuver in flight and strike within in a radius as small as 2 meters. The Russians versions, especially the Tochka-U, can’t.

On top of that, says Cranny-Evans, the Russians suffered from poor intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) for much of the war, because Ukrainians were shooting down the drones needed to see targets in real time; if you can’t see your target, it doesn’t matter how accurate your missiles are.

That situation changed since Ukraine began running out of air-defense munitions, so the addition of a reported 200 Iranian HIMARS-like missiles to Russia’s armory could now create a significant problem for Ukraine in areas within about 100 kilometers of the front, especially because the satellite-guided Fath-360s are maneuverable in flight. They could also free Russia’s much more powerful and sophisticated, but scarce, Iskander missiles for more challenging tasks.

Every new missile Russia gets is bad news for Ukraine. But the only true “escalation” here is that some of the long-range, guided artillery being used by Russia will now be made in Iran. The same can be said about Ukraine’s use of NATO-manufactured missiles. But that’s no reason to consider the Western alliance suddenly at war directly with Russia, any more than Kyiv is already directly at war with Iran, because Russia’s been firing Iranian Shahed loitering munitions at targets across Ukraine since 2022.

Putin, of course, knows all this. He wants to be able to replenish his armory with foreign “HIMARS” equivalents, for use against Ukraine’s deep supply lines and command centers, while applying nuclear intimidation to stop the US giving Kyiv any similar new advantage. There are no Marquess of Queensberry rules in war.

Managing all this isn’t appeasement. But Ukraine’s allies need to do better job of it, calling out Putin’s manipulations and exaggerations sooner and more clearly, and making sure he doesn’t achieve his goals in this predatory war by simple intimidation.

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