Keir Starmer was born a month before the Cuban Missile Crisis, the standoff in October 1962 that brought the world to the brink of nuclear war between the US and the Soviet Union.
When the British prime minister meets US President Joe Biden in Washington today, they’ll face a choice with similarly momentous implications: whether to enable Ukraine to fire Western weapons at military targets deep inside Russia.
Vladimir Putin warned bluntly yesterday that such a step will mean Ukraine’s US and NATO allies “are at war with Russia.”
The Kremlin leader controls the world’s biggest nuclear arsenal. On the day Russia began its February 2022 invasion, he threatened consequences “such as you have never seen” for anyone siding with Ukraine.
As its war has faltered, Russia repeatedly threatened escalation if successive red lines were crossed. Ukraine and its allies called its bluff each time.
Kyiv and some eastern European states argue this shows Putin is the emperor with no clothes, and that Ukraine must be empowered to defeat Russia to achieve a just resolution of the war.
Western assessments that Iran sent ballistic missiles to Russia to aid its attacks on Ukraine have apparently bolstered that case. Biden and Starmer are weighing whether to let Ukraine conduct long-range strikes in Russia with British Storm Shadow cruise missiles guided by US navigational data.
It’s a calculated gamble that Ukraine will either destroy airbases and missile depots used to bomb its cities, or that Russia will withdraw its weapons beyond strike range and render them ineffective.
Putin faces exposure as a weak leader for Russians if Ukraine and NATO ignore his warnings of war. A nuclear ultimatum from Moscow in response to the strikes risks triggering a second missile crisis.
Who’ll blink first? The war is approaching a crunch moment.— Anthony Halpin