The Stakes of Deep Strikes: Zelensky’s Plan and Putin’s Warning Signal Escalation in the Ukraine War

by Simplicius

It seems every news cycle there is now some major new development surrounding Ukraine, which threatens to plunge the war into some elevated state of risk and threat. This is by design because Zelensky and his curators need to constantly drum up a sense of advancement in the narrative, otherwise the increasingly dire situation on the front threatens to swallow the entire war effort whole.

Today that “shiny new object” meant to give UA supporters some small glint of hope is the information package surrounding permission for deep strikes into Russia.

 

 
First let’s clear up the nuances to this report. Some believe the decision has already been made and the media is merely trotting out its regular theater to warm up the public. But the other missed detail is two-fold:

First the US apparently wants Ukraine to demonstrate a tangible plan for how it would utilize these ‘deep strikes’ to actually achieve victory, rather than merely some vague psychological effect.

 
And for this precise reason, Zelensky is traveling to the US to present his plan, which some sources have claimed has three points, which I outlined last time, but as reminder:

1. Zelensky wants the US to allow long-range strikes into Russia with foreign missiles to destroy all military bases, airfields, ammunition and fuel depots within the European part of Russia.

2. The West (US/NATO) must protect Western Ukraine with Polish and Romanian air defense systems from Russian retaliation strikes so Ukraine could transfer own air defense systems closer to the battlefield.

3. The West must guarantee to be prepared to get more involved by sending ground troops to certain parts of Ukraine to free up Ukraine’s manpower which could be sent to the front lines. Zelensky believes after this campaign Russia would be forced to retreat, at some point Putin’s leadership would be destabilized and replaced, with the new leadership signing a peace deal.

Another report:

Zelensky and Biden will meet in Washington in two days, US Secretary of State Blinken said.

Zelensky said that in two days he will present Joe Biden with a “plan for victory over Russia.” The latecomer said the plan would be, in particular, psychological and political in nature, as well as “weapons of various kinds,” which, according to Zelensky, should encourage Russia to end the war.

This is not corroborated officially as yet, so take it with a grain of salt. However, we already have some sand to throw on the above via another breaking story, which is that infamous Russian pranksters Vovan & Lexus had just caught Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski in their net. Sikorski directly addresses two of the points above, totally dispelling them. He was under the impression he was speaking to Ukraine’s Petro Poroshenko as part of the gag.

Here he plainly states that right now there is no chance for Poland, and likely the rest of NATO, in shooting down any Russian assets or joining the war:

 
In the slightly longer version, at the end he actually states: “We don’t want to confirm what Medvedev, Putin, and Russian propaganda has been accusing us of.” He’s saying that Poland does not want to validate the very reason behind Russia’s war on Ukraine, which is that the West intends to use Ukraine to directly attack Russia.

Sikorski says quite a few other extremely interesting things, which I’ll post later so as not to derail the current thread. However, the one snippet I’ll show is his affirmation that NATO membership is a carrot-on-a-stick being used by the West against Ukraine, and that Ukraine has no real chance of joining the alliance:

 
This is particularly timely because Blinken has just released a new statement claiming Ukraine will definitely join NATO.

The relief, of course, is that Sikorski confirms: “There is no willingness in Europe to have a war with Russia, this is an absolute red line.”

This is good news, as it shows behind the scenes Europe has a few saner and cooler heads than we sometimes imagine, and Sikorski even goes on to admit that much of his posturing is for the public’s sake to make Putin “wonder”—i.e. part of the infamous “strategic ambiguity” that Europe has banked on out of desperation.

But let’s continue on.

So: we know that the US wants to see concrete plans for why Ukraine needs to strike Russian territory in order to “win”. The only plausible scenario that Zelensky can sell them is that he intends to “hurt” Russia in some way, by striking sensitive sites, as to force it into a peace settlement. That would be the ostensibly public “plan”, whereas the real plan would be to force Russia and NATO into a confrontation—but Zelensky can’t say this part out loud. The former plan would lead to Zelensky’s political demise, as peace would see him removed from power; the latter plan would allow a continuation of his criminal regime’s rule.

One of the problems is: major transnational conglomerates like BlackRock and the Soros Empire have all signed deals with Zelensky’s regime—and it’s in their great interest to keep those contracts active. Should Zelensky be removed, they know a new leader could annul their deals, causing trillions in future losses. Thus, it serves the cabal’s interests to keep as corrupt a regime in Ukraine in power as long as possible.

Now, the second part of the ongoing developments is that even should the US give Ukraine some new discretion to strike Russia, it appears to be a limited one:

 
As you can see in the above, the US will likely attempt to “sit on both chairs” by acceding to Ukraine’s demands to give them some more leeway in strikes, but still hoping to not provoke Russia into an uncontrollable or runaway escalatory spiral. This would logically entail Ukraine given conditional permission to strike certain conventional targets, but not anything even remotely sensitive, with a long list of red-line “no-gos” which would of course include things like nuclear plants, but even likely governmental or institutional structures, for instance—at the extreme end of the case—striking the Kremlin.

This may sound absurd at face value, but Zelensky literally stated: “It’s a pity we can’t strike the Kremlin” in an interview days ago—citing the poor range of his weapons—and Ukraine would love the ability to “humiliate” Russia and boost its morale by doing something like that.

 
Now comes the final element. Ukraine is begging to strike Russian territory with long range weapons, but are there really that many remaining?

There have been reports that Ukraine has already used almost “all” of its supplied ATACMS. This was stated explicitly by CNN in their new article:

 
From the earlier NYT article:

 
You’ll recall a couple reports ago I had detailed how the US itself may only have 1000-1500 total ATACMS in its inventory remaining and Ukraine was said to have received upwards of 200-300 of them.

Here’s the problem:

 
People are underestimating just how expensive the ATACMS is. At upwards of $1.5 to $1.7 million each, the total complement of ~300 would have cost around $500,000,000 dollars. The problem with this is that the US has very little military aid left to Ukraine, and its recent “packages” have been only a couple hundred million each, and that is needed to pay for a vast array of different types of ammunition for all systems—you know, the systems actually fighting the real battle on the frontline, like artillery, not systems meant to be used for fancifully pointless PR attacks deep inside Russia.

Not only does the US not have many ATACMS left for itself in case of war, supplying another several hundred of them to Ukraine is prohibitively costly—do people just think these high-level prestige systems grow on trees? From the same CNN piece:

 
These $1.5+ million dollar missiles, by the way, are being shot down by Russian interceptors costing $100-200k or less. The math simply does not work from any perspective.

The second issue is that, as CNN noted above, “several hundred” of these ATACMS, which potentially represents upwards of 20-40% of the entire US stockpile, have already been expended—and to what effect? If a major portion of the entire US stockpile has had negligible effect in degrading Russia’s warfighting ability, don’t you think that might be a kind of bellwether of things?

Even some of Ukraine’s top ‘experts’ admit the fallacy:

 
Of course, now there’s talk of JASSM missiles, and the above is merely the underscoring of the point I had made several articles ago where I stated that JASSMs do not represent some “new” wunderwaffe ability but rather the desperate measure of carrying over Ukrainian strike capability from the depleted ATACMS. The JASSMs are much cheaper, at reportedly $700k or so, and on top of that, the US has far more of them in stock—supposedly in the several thousands.

Finally, we get to the most important part. Putin released his new statement regarding the recent developments about potentially greenlighting these deep strikes into Russia. He makes an extremely significant point that most people have missed, which explains why, specifically, Russia considers this as a direct involvement by NATO in the war.

Listen carefully:

 
Most people simply assumed that Russia fears having some important rear areas being destroyed. But what Putin points out is the distinction between Ukraine’s own paltry drone strikes deep into Russia, which can be carried out by Ukraine acting independently, with the long range strikes of these advanced weapons systems which require direct Western integration, support, and ultimately, participation in the strikes. That’s because many of these systems, like the Storm Shadows, as it was explained to us long ago, require the originating country’s direct involvement in programming the coordinates into them, not to mention the initial satellite surveillance necessary for obtaining the targeting itself.

This was why, you may recall, Germany expressly forbid sending Taurus missiles, as it was declared that German technicians would need to be on the ground directly programming the targeting solutions into the missiles, which would mean their explicit involvement in the war as combatants. You can hear the leaked German Army call discussing precisely this, here.

For those that still don’t understand, let me explain a little more clearly: when Ukraine sends its cardboard drones to Moscow, it can get the coordinates on google maps or whatever other open source database, and does not really need Western involvement. But advanced missiles and weapons systems are often run by proprietary software that requires special keys, programs, equipment, etc., to input the coordinates into them which cannot be done by the Ukrainians themselves, because giving them such digital ‘keys’ could compromise the entire system even in the home NATO countries in case of future conflict.

Thus, Putin is saying that for these systems to strike deep into Russia would necessarily mean NATO would be directly involved as a combatant in striking Russian territory in a more express way than ever before. The most obvious immediate Russian response would likely be to arm the Houthis with advanced anti-ship missiles which would straightaway endanger the entire US fleet.

The ramifications of this are far greater than most can imagine, given the cascading effect it would have. The US fleet is there to deter Iran and Hezbollah in protecting Israel. Should the Houthis possess an ability to completely cripple the US fleet, the falling chips would be: Israel’s defeat, which would mean the entire Empire’s defeat in the Middle East as Iran would reign supreme. This catastrophic sequence of events would result in the entire eventual collapse of the Western order. As such, the US obviously would not like to risk this scenario.

From today’s NY Times article, this angle is confirmed:

 
Further down, they note again:

In classified briefings, American intelligence officials have expressed deeper concerns about direct, visible American participation in Ukraine’s move to seize and hold positions near Kursk. There are indications, they have warned, that Russia could provide technological help that would allow Iran and its proxy forces to attack American forces in the Middle East.

For those interested here is Putin’s full statement transcribed, which clarifies my thesis:

Putin: The FULL Statement on the “permission” by US and UK for long range Western missiles attacking the territory of the Russian Federation:

“There is an attempt to substitute concepts. Because we are not talking about allowing or prohibiting the Kiev regime to strike at Russian territory. It is already striking with the help of unmanned aerial vehicles and other means. But when it comes to using high–precision long-range Western-made weapons, it’s a completely different story. The fact is that, as I have already said, and any experts will confirm this (both here and in the West), the Ukrainian army is not able to strike with modern high-precision long-range systems of Western production. It can’t do that. This is possible only with the use of satellite data, which Ukraine does not have — this is data only from satellites of either the European Union or the United States, in general, from NATO satellites. This is the first one. The second, and very important, perhaps key, is that flight missions to these missile systems can, in fact, only be carried out by military personnel of NATO countries. Ukrainian servicemen cannot do this. And therefore, it is not a question of allowing the Ukrainian regime to strike Russia with these weapons or not to allow it. It’s about deciding whether NATO countries are directly involved in a military conflict or not. If this decision is made, it will mean nothing more than the direct participation of NATO countries, the United States, and European countries in the war in Ukraine. This is their direct involvement. And this, of course, significantly changes the very essence, the very nature of the conflict. This will mean that NATO countries, the United States, and European countries are at war with Russia. And if this is the case, then, bearing in mind the change in the very essence of this conflict, we will make appropriate decisions based on the threats that will be created to us.”

Lastly, let me state that despite the hubbub surrounding this, with many outlets reporting with near ‘certainty’ that permission is about to be, or has already been, granted, it seems to me like the opposite is the case, and Biden’s fear-stricken administration is flip-flopping as ever. The official statements today still resoundingly said “no policy change” is expected. My read is that they are desperately scrounging for some symbolic targets to allow Ukraine to hit, which can be approved with a secret backdoor handshake between Russia, where all parties can be satisfied. US and Russia will agree to not escalate, and US may even make some secret small concession in order to allow Ukraine their slight indulgence. But we’ll see what happens.

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