by Bernhard at Moon of Alabama
Today the Ukrainian former president Vladimir Zelenski will be in Washington to convince U.S. President Donald Trump to further turn the screws on Russia.
A call yesterday between President Vladimir Putin of Russia and Trump was initiated by the Russians to preempt any concessions from Trump to Ukraine.
A major headache for the Russians was the potential introduction of U.S. Tomahawk cruise missiles onto the battlefield. While these weapons are old, and can easily be defended against, they are, in principle, nuclear capable. They are also complex and can not be fired without the input from U.S. satellites, U.S. intelligence analysis and specialized software.
Tomahawks are naval missiles. There are less than a handful of ground launchers which were only recently introduced to the U.S. military. Any launch of a Tomahawk from Ukrainian ground would thus have to be done by the U.S. military. Any U.S. firing of a potentially nuclear armed missile towards Moscow would have to have serious consequences.
Russia would HAVE to respond to such an attack with a direct attack on major U.S. assets. Otherwise its means of (nuclear) deterrence would lose of all of their values.
Putin wanted to avoid that situation and the decisions that would have followed from it. Thus his call to Donald Trump.
So far that part of the call of seems to have been successful:
In recent days, Mr Trump had shown an openness to selling Ukraine long-range Tomahawk cruise missiles, even as Mr Putin warned that such a move would further strain the US-Russian relationship.
But following Thursday’s call with Mr Putin, Mr Trump appeared to downplay the prospects of Ukraine getting the missiles, which have a range of about 995 miles (1,600km).
“We need Tomahawks for the United States of America too,” Mr Trump said.
“We have a lot of them, but we need them. I mean, we can’t deplete our country.”
After the call Trump announced that there would soon be a new summit between him and President Putin:
President Putin and I will then meet in an agreed upon location, Budapest, Hungary, to see if we can bring this “inglorious” War, between Russia and Ukraine, to an end.
It is notable that The Russian readout was much less committed:…
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