Get ready for World War Three: Zelensky said missiles speak louder than words… now they have roared: MARK ALMOND

The war raging in Eastern Europe is now at its most critical stage. In the last few days it has risked turning from a conflict between Russia and Ukraine to a global conflagration.

North Korea has sent 10,000 troops to boost Putin’s forces and the US has permitted the use of its long-range missiles on targets on Russian soil. 

Can the war any longer be fought out solely between Kyiv and Moscow?

Within hours of US President Joe Biden authorising Ukraine to use the ATACMS (Army Tactical Missile Systems), President Zelensky launched a strike.

At 0325 local time yesterday morning, six ATACMS were fired at a Russian military facility – reportedly used to store North Korean supplied shells – in the Bryansk region, just 80 miles from the Ukrainian border.

Asked about the weapons on Sunday, Zelensky remarked laconically that missiles will speak for themselves. Now they have roared.

One only need listen to the escalation in rhetoric from an enraged President Putin to discern how keenly the blow has been felt in the Kremlin.

Even before the ATACMS missile had been fired, he had issued a revised nuclear doctrine to declare that an attack on Russia by any nation supported by a nuclear power will be considered a joint attack by both countries.

Joe Biden finally gave Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky permission at the weekend to use US-supplied missiles in attacks within Russia

Cars burned and buildings were wrecked when a residential area was hit by a Russian missile strike in Odesa, Ukraine, on Monday 

In other words, if Washington allowed Ukraine to fire US-made missiles into Russia, Moscow would consider the Americans to be directly involved in the war in Ukraine.

Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov accused the West of ‘escalation’ and said the ATACMS were being operated by ‘American military experts’. And indeed, these missiles can only be fired by US personnel and with the help of US satellite data.

The response Russia has promised is cataclysmic, with one senior politician close to Putin saying the firing of the missiles would be a ‘big step towards World War 3’.

A fortnight ago, Putin warned that Russia would respond to any attack from the West with ‘overwhelming nuclear firepower’ and, underlining his point, conducted nuclear drills with missiles fired from land, sea and air.

Terrifying stuff – and yet this is hardly the first time that Western leaders have ignored one of Vladimir Putin’s red lines, and each time they have done so without the Russian president making good on this tyrannical threats and nuclear bluster.

At the start of the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Putin warned that any interference from the West would be met with consequences ‘such as you have never seen in your entire history’.

Ever since, he has used blood-curdling threats to try to intimidate the West into inaction – an approach that has proved highly effective, with risk-averse Western leaders who have, fatally, prevaricated over every decision.

From the use of tanks to fighter jets and long-range missiles, the West has hesitated before finally giving the go-ahead. 

Indeed, had the ATACMS been used six months ago, Ukraine’s current energy crisis, caused by the unprecedented destruction of its power plants, might have been averted.

We cannot yet be sure what damage was caused by those six ATACMs, or even how many got through, but the Russians have admitted to a fire at the base. Another line has undeniably been crossed and there can now be no going back. 

So how worried should we be? There is no doubt that with each crossed line, the risk increases. Russia is showing signs of increasing belligerence towards the West.

Earlier this month, for instance, Royal Navy ships were summoned to escort the hypersonic-missile-armed Russian frigate Admiral Golovko through the English Channel to its destination in the Atlantic, where it is currently on exercises.

Other Russian ships prowl the seas above vital internet cables and, perhaps even more worryingly, at least one Chinese ship seems to have let its anchor drag over such cables linking Germany and Scandinavia – a prescient warning of the vulnerability of the West’s communications and of where China stands.

The arrival of over 10,000 North Korean soldiers on the border with Ukraine shows how the conflict is spreading. With South Korea supplying munitions to Kyiv, the risk of a new Korean War is looming on the horizon, too.

This should all be a collective wake-up call for the West which may, perhaps, have become complacent about a brutal war now well into its third year, as though it is simply a feature on the landscape not a potentially all-devouring monster.

The dangerous events of recent days should firmly shake us out of such sentiments.

 As Putin’s new nuclear doctrine makes clear, should the Prime Minister follow in President Biden’s footsteps and grant permission for Ukraine to use our Storm Shadow cruise missiles, it could make our island a Russian target.

Even without the terrifying prospect of nuclear weapons, the risk of hybrid warfare now looms large – and may indeed already be unfolding.

An ATACMS – Army Tactical Missile Systems – being fired from a M270 Multiple Launch Rocket System

On top of the sabotage of internet cables, Western security officials also suspect Russia was behind a plot earlier this month to put incendiary devices in packages on cargo planes bound for North America. 

One of them caught fire at a courier hub in Germany and another, disguised as an electric massage machine, ignited in a warehouse in Birmingham.

Both would be powerful enough to cause a plane to come down. There is also the grim prospect of the use of thermobaric bombs (which scatter fuel before igniting it in a cloud that can vaporise human bodies), deployed by the US military in Afghanistan and dubbed ‘the mother of all bombs’.

Not nuclear but as devastating as a tactical nuke, maybe one would act as a ‘warning’ to NATO by taking out the airbase in eastern Poland at Rzeszow – the hub for transferring weapons from the US to neighbouring Ukraine.

All this is alarming enough, but this unfolding crisis – one that is as threatening to global geopolitical stability as the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 – is taking place against the backdrop of a deeply worrying vacuum of power in Washington.

John F Kennedy was in his mid-40s during the Cuban missile crisis. Sixty-two years later the current incumbent of the Oval Office is 81, and by his own admission no longer fit to hold office.

Unlike the Kremlin, the White House lacks a strong leader. A frail and lame duck president, surrounded by factions, will shortly give way to the unknown quantities of a Trump administration.

More countries are being pulled into the conflict, such as North Korea – whose troops have been training in Russia near the border with Ukraine

Vladimir Putin warned earlier this month that Russia would respond to any attack from the West with ‘overwhelming nuclear firepower’

The President-elect’s son, Donald Trump Jr, has claimed that authorising the use of ATACMS would bring about World War 3, and was a deliberate attempt to thwart his father’s promise to broker a peace deal within 24 hours of entering the White House. We can only pray he is mistaken.

Our own wartime leader Winston Churchill said that you can always rely on the Americans to make the right decision, but only when they have tried all the alternatives.

Whatever happens next, the West has little option but to hold its nerve as the waning Biden administration plays nuclear poker with Putin.

Doing the right thing at the last moment is a strange type of brinkmanship. Leaving the Ukrainians to their fate would have been a worse choice, but the stakes have never been higher.

Mark Almond is Director of the Crisis Research Institute, Oxford