End in Sight

Maj. Gen. Atanu Pattanaik (retd)

As the leaders of the G20 gathered at the summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on 19 November 2024, the war in Ukraine clocked yet another landmark, completing 1,000 days. The war also entered a new and possibly dangerous phase with American President Joe Biden giving a go-ahead to Kiev to use the American-supplied Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS), for attacks farther inside Russia. The Ukrainian military launched multiple ATACMS missiles at Russia’s Bryansk Region. Biden used the alibi of Russia reportedly deploying thousands of North Korean troops to reinforce its war. The clearance came barely a fortnight after the presidential election victory of Donald Trump, who has said that he would bring about a swift end to the war.

Putin has warned that Moscow could provide long-range weapons to others (like Belarus) to strike western targets if North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) allies allow Ukraine to use their arms to attack Russian territory and decreed to lower the nuclear threshold a notch. For the American ‘Deep State’, this is a race against time. The effort seems to be to create a situation that makes it difficult for Trump to bring the war to an end or disengage the US from it without a loss of face. One such possible trigger is to force Putin to target any NATO member country’s military assets like missile sites in retaliation for the ATACM attacks from Kiev. Such an action would entail invoking Article 5 of the NATO Agreement which provides that if a NATO ally is the victim of an armed attack, each and every other member of the Alliance will consider this act of violence as an a