Thread by @baunov

THREAD 1/12 The fact that Russia possesses nuclear weapons and delivery systems remains a key limiting factor for continued support to Ukraine. The logic goes: if Ukraine hasn’t won the war in three years, it probably won’t win it at all — and meanwhile, every day carries nuclear risk.

2/12 Nuclear posturing has become a routine tool used by both lower-level and more senior subordinates of Putin. Recently, even Keith Kellogg, from the Trump administration, reacted to it.

3/12 A strike on Russia’s nuclear deterrence infrastructure should demonstrate to skeptics that this nuclear threat has limits — it is not absolute, and it can be diminished or even neutralized.

4/12 More than that: to some extent, such a strike should show that Russia is bluffing. Even if the operation is purely Ukrainian in execution, the targeting intelligence for the airbases likely came from Western sources — or at least, that’s how it will be perceived in Russia.

5/12 Which means Western countries are, in effect, involved in a strike on elements of Russia’s nuclear triad — and yet Russia does not retaliate against the very countries those weapons are primarily aimed at.

6/12 And whom would it retaliate against, anyway? Whose data was used — it’s unclear. Say it was American, but if the operation was in the making for over a year, the intelligence might have been gathered under the previous administration.

7/12 For the past couple of years, Russian loyalist experts have repeated that any direct Western involvement in strikes deep into Russian territory should trigger retaliation. Now something like that is happening — and yet it’s not at all clear whom to retaliate against or how.

8/12 Ukraine, it seems, is prepared to absorb some form of retaliation in order to demonstrate that even targeting assets as symbolically central as nuclear forces does not result in strikes on Western territory.

9/12 Another effect of the strike: rebuilding Russia’s strategic aviation will require enormous resources — which will have to be diverted either from the war or from the civilian budget.

10/12 If Russia’s response is to walk away from negotiations or harden its position, that would fatally hurt its relationship with the Trump administration.

11/12 And for everyone — including Trump himself — it’s a demonstration that Ukraine is far from defeated. Which means supporting it still makes sense.

12/12 There’s also another problem with the idea of a Russian retaliatory strike: is there any confidence that there are no more trucks or covert launch sites inside Russia with drones already in place, ready to strike new targets? And what exactly would those targets be?