Over the past week, Ukrainian drones have struck two Russian Voronezh-M nuclear early warning radar stations. These stations, located in Armavir (Krasnodar Krai) and Orsk (Orenburg Oblast), are key elements of Russia’s nuclear deterrent system.
According to the Russian military doctrine, an attack on nuclear deterrent facilities could be a pretext for a nuclear strike by Russia.
So far, neither Ukraine nor the Russian Federation has officially commented on these strikes, except for the statement by Senator Dmitry Rogozin, who accused the US of involvement in the attack and stated that the Americans "will respond in full.".
What does this mean?
Experts express different opinions regarding the purely military feasibility of striking these stations.
Some believe that there is a reason for this, since the stations were used by the Russians to track missile launches from Ukraine. Others say that they were unlikely to be used for this purpose. In addition, the result of the attack is unknown - whether the radars were disabled or not.
But these strikes may also have political reasons and consequences.
It is possible that in this way Ukraine is trying to show the West that it should not be afraid of nuclear threats from Russia, since it cannot even protect its own nuclear deterrent systems. Therefore, it is possible to strike Russian territory with Western weapons, shoot down Russian missiles with NATO air defense systems, and introduce troops into Ukraine.
Although, in reality, the consequences of these strikes could be exactly the opposite, sharply increasing the West's fears about the threat of nuclear war and giving additional arguments to those who, for example, oppose consent to strikes with Western missiles against the Russian Federation.
What will be Russia's reaction? The Russian authorities have not yet officially reacted to the strikes on the stations. Perhaps they are still deciding on a public and non-public reaction. And they will try to use the situation in their interests, in one way or another "strengthening" the signal to the West that "the situation is on the verge.".
But, in any case, strikes on Russian nuclear facilities are a powerful pass to the Russian "war party", which has long demanded a move from verbal threats to the West to direct action or to issuing an ultimatum with the threat of using nuclear weapons.
It is not a fact that these specific strikes will become a pretext for such actions or an ultimatum, but they strengthen the positions of those forces in Moscow that advocate radicalizing the conflict with the West.
And this generally fits into the overall strategy of the conditional global "war party" to take it to a new level of escalation, possibly leading to a direct clash between the West and the Russian Federation.
