“There is a growing consensus about supplying Ukraine with howitzers and more complex weapons systems, and everyone is doing that now,” noted Mr Heisbourg.
“But it’s another thing to shift the war target from Ukraine to Russia. I don’t believe there is a consensus on that.” Weakening Russia’s military capability “is a good thing,” said Mr Heisbourg, “but it is a means to an end, not an end in itself.”
There are other factors that can broaden the conflict. Sweden and Finland are expected to seek entry into NATO within weeks — expanding the alliance in response to Mr Putin’s attempts to break it up. But the process could take months as each NATO country would have to ratify the move, and that could usher in a period of vulnerability. Russia could threaten both countries before they are formally admitted to the alliance, and thus before they fall under the NATO treaty that states that an attack on one member is an attack on all.
But there is less and less doubt that Sweden and Finland will become the 31st and 32nd members of the alliance. Mr Niblett said another NATO expansion — exactly what Mr Putin has objected to for the past two decades — “would make explicit the new front lines of the impasse with Russia”.
Not surprisingly, both sides are toying with fears that the war could spread, in propaganda campaigns that parallel the ongoing war on the ground. Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky regularly raises the possibility in his evening radio speeches; two weeks ago, while begging NATO allies for more weapons, he argued that “we can stop Russia or lose all of Eastern Europe.”
Russia has its own handbook, occasionally arguing that its goals go beyond Ukraine’s “denazification” to the removal of NATO troops and weapons from allied countries neither of which hosted before 1997. Moscow’s frequent references to the growing risk of nuclear war seem meant to drive home the point that the West should not go too far.
That message is resonating in Germany, which has long tried to avoid challenging Putin, said Ulrich Speck, a German analyst. Saying “Russia must not win”, he said, is different from saying “Russia must lose”.
There is concern in Berlin that “we shouldn’t push Putin too hard against the wall,” Mr Speck said, “so he can get desperate and do something really irresponsible.”
