News & Comment

Russia’s goal was probably not to assemble an attacking force to overwhelm the Ukrainian military, said Jack Watling, a senior research fellow at Britain’s Royal United Services Institute. Instead it was probably trying to stabilise its losses and draw out the conflict beyond next year. ...“It means that new Ukrainian manoeuvre units must be trained and equipped to counter new Russian formations in the spring,” Watling said, warning of the risk of complacency in the west about the need to prepare the Ukrainian military for a drawn-out conflict.

A commentary published during the summer by Sidharth Kaushal and Sam Cranny-Evans at Britain’s Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) says that the use of tactical nuclear weapons against command centers or air bases in Europe could limit civilian casualties in surrounding areas. For instance, the RUSI report says use of a tactical nuke in the Sulwaki Gap, the land border between NATO allies Poland and Lithuania that separates Russian Kaliningrad from its neighbor Belarus, could only cause civilian casualties in the hundreds.

[The] Kharkiv counteroffensive was an embarrassing defeat for Putin and the announcement of partial mobilization and renewed threats to deploy nuclear weapons indicates that Putin is under a lot of pressure to respond to it,” according to Natia Seskuria, an associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute who specializes in Russian foreign and domestic policy.