THE VIEWS EXPRESSED BY CONTRIBUTORS ARE THEIR OWN AND NOT THE VIEW OF THE HILL
BY LEON ARON, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR
– 07/14/26
Vladimir Putin’s troubles are adding up. His public denials notwithstanding, the war in Ukraine and economy at home are heading in the wrong direction.
His implied social contract with his subjects — you support me in this war and I will shield you from its consequences — is beginning to fray. An assault on a NATO member state, followed by a nuclear ultimatum to end the war on Moscow’s terms, debasing the alliance in the process, is looking like an increasingly attractive option.
Four factors are forcing Putin’s hand.
After an estimated 1.2. million Russian dead and wounded, at around 35,000 average monthly casualties, the “special military operation” has turned into an endless war of attrition he cannot win and cannot afford to lose. Russia’s key advantage over Ukraine — cannon fodder — has become all but irrelevant. Throwing 300,000 more men into the trenches by ordering another “partial mobilization,” as even the militaristic Russian “Z” bloggers warn, will only result in the draftees’ dying without altering “the nature of the war.” A “technological breakthrough” is needed, the bloggers declare, to counter Ukrainian drones.
But despite Putin’s promises, none appears on the horizon.
On the verge of recession for most of 2025,Russia’s economy shrank in the first quarter of this year. Disappointing gas and oil revenues no longer cover the estimated $900-million-a day war, which consumes 70 percent of the budget. A 14.25-percent interest rate depresses the already battered and deflated civilian sector. With average inflation at 5 percent, the prices of Russians’ diet staples like bread and chicken have ratcheted up to twice the official rate.
Ukraine’s drone strikes at some of the largest oil refiners have reduced gasoline production by over a quarter. Rationing and long lines at gas stations are now standard even in Moscow. The bombings of Moscow and St. Petersburg embarrassed the Kremlin, forcing it to scale down its military parade on Russia’s main national holiday, Victory Day. Weeks of drone attacks have wrecked the transport and electricity systems in occupied Crimea, causing the declaration of a state of emergency.
For the first time, even court pollsters registered the diminution of his popularity.
And then there is the unique and time-limited opportunity offered by the Trump White House: the ambivalence of its commitment to NATO, and the amorality of its unwillingness (or inability) to distinguish between just wars and wars of aggression.
President Trump once compared President Volodymyr Zelensky and Putin to “two kids fighting in the park.” The former was publicly berated in the Oval Office by Trump, in front of television cameras. He was cold-shouldered in collective meetings with other heads of state. Meanwhile, the latter was given many warm phone chats with Trump and feted at a summit, complete with red carpet, honor guard, and a ride in the U.S president’s limo. Trump has at times also seemed to accept the former KGB lieutenant colonel’s assertion that Ukraine started the war.
Finally, assailing NATO is tempting because of the vulnerability of the alliance’s member states on Russia’s border: Estonia (population 1.36 million) and Latvia (1.85 million), with ethnic Russians one-fifth and almost one-fourth of their citizens, respectively.
Ploys already abound. Russian intelligence services have begun plotting a false flag legend by claiming that Ukrainian drone operators were in Latvia to prepare strikes against Russia. Don’t count on NATO “protecting” you in the case of Russia’s response, the Russian ambassador to the U.N., Vasily Nebenzya, told his Latvian counterpart: It would be you who “provoked Russia’s action.”
An invasion is liable to start with Russia pulverizing the runways with drones and missiles to prevent by-air reinforcements and putting out of commission the Warsaw-Kaunas railway, which is NATO’s only rail link to the Baltics. Under the circumstances, NATO’s 40,000-strong high-readiness multinational Allied Reaction Force would take days, if not weeks, to move its key assets to the battle theater.
Such deployment would also have to wait until 32 heads of allied states in Brussels unanimously agree that an aggression took place, and then decide, pursuant to Article 5 of the NATO Treaty, on “such action as [they] deem necessary, individually or in concert with the other Parties to assist the Party or Parties so attacked.”
But Putin is not looking for a conventional confrontation with NATO, whose military strength is orders of magnitude superior to his own. Instead, the Kremlin would aim to occupy either of two small patches of Estonia or Latvia: the 1,150-square-mile Ida-Viru county, where three-quarters of the population is ethnic Russian, or the 5,600-square-mile Latgale province, which is one-third Russian.
After either of these areas is “accepted” into Russia following a fraudulent “referendum” under the barrels of Kalashnikovs, Putin only has to invoke Article 18 of the Military Doctrine of the Russian Federation, which gives the president the right to use nuclear weapons even in a conventional conflict if he determines that the state is under “critical threat.” A direct confrontation between Russia and NATO, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov warned the West last month, “could quickly escalate into an exchange of nuclear strikes with catastrophic consequences.”
To avoid such “consequences,” Putin would appeal to NATO to step back from the precipice of nuclear Armageddon and reach a settlement that would secure “a lasting peace” in Europe.
Russia’s conditions — all of which the Kremlin had pressed on the West before and spelled out in Trump’s “28-Point Peace Plan” and in the Russian foreign ministry’s list of demands before the invasion of Ukraine— are certain to include the withdrawal of Ukrainian troops from Donbass; international recognition of Russia’s sovereignty overCrimea, Donetsk, Luhansk and the occupied portions of Kherson and Zaporizhzhya; and a two-third reduction of Ukraine’s armed forces.
Putin’s other terms are likely to reflect his “New Yalta” agenda: an abiding ambition to reshuffle, Stalin-like, the post-Cold War strategic boundaries of Europe. To eliminate what he has repeatedly cited as the “root causes” of the war on Ukraine, all “foreign troops” would have to be removed from the post-1990 NATO member states, effectively reversing the alliance’s eastward 1999-2004 expansion, and no new members ever to be admitted, especially Ukraine. There shall not be “any military activity” by NATO anywhere on the territory of the former Soviet Union and no large-scale military exercises in the proximity to the Russian borders.
Will Putin roll the dice to extricate himself from the quagmire of the unwinnable war, luxuriate in immense popularity at home and, in one fell swoop, cement a place in history with a feat that even his beloved Soviet Union couldn’t pull off: humiliating and perhaps fatally degrading the West’s armor? And will NATO consider such a choice “far-fetched” and “speculative,” or start preparing for it today? We may not have to wait long for answers.
Leon Aron is the author, most recently, of “Riding the Tiger: Vladimir Putin’s Russia and the Uses of War.“
It’s time the West issued an ultimatum to the terrorist. Move one inch onto NATO territory and moscow disappears.
Sadly, never happen
“Under the circumstances, NATO’s 40,000-strong high-readiness multinational Allied Reaction Force would take days, if not weeks, to move its key assets to the battle theater.”
Maybe someone with brains in NATO would move key assets now, not after mafia land decide to gamble.
Wow…brains and NATO are hardly ever used together.
“And then there is the unique and time-limited opportunity offered by the Trump White House: the ambivalence of its commitment to NATO, and the amorality of its unwillingness (or inability) to distinguish between just wars and wars of aggression.”
This is the overwhelming factor in putler’s cost/benefit analysis.
Is the current crisis in the formerly stable Zel administration going to delay a Balts attack?
I’d guess yes. As long as putler has his bum chum onside and the prospect of putlerist regimes in Germany and France, he might hold back for now.
But if he did take a chunk of Balts territory and threaten a nuclear response, imagine all the marshmallows queuing up to do a deal with the child-murderer ….
“Putin only has to invoke Article 18 of the Military Doctrine of the Russian Federation, which gives the president the right to use nuclear weapons even in a conventional conflict if he determines that the state is under “critical threat.”
I think this is more BS. The putler regime is being smashed left, right and centre. Crimea is uninhabitable and supposedly a part of mafia land, yet no article 18 has been invoked.
It’s BS yes.
But the type of BS that Ukraine’s “friends” have been buying for 12 years.
I don’t think that the runt will do anything military-wise elsewhere except for his usual hybrid bullshit.