Escalation in Ukraine and the Continued Danger of a Wider War

by Alexander Hill & Ted Snider

Alexander Hill is Professor in Military History at the University of Calgary and editor of the Routledge Handbook of Soviet and Russian Military Studies published in February 2025, as well as other books and articles on Soviet and Russian military affairs including The Red Army and the Second World War (Cambridge University Press, 2017).

Ted Snider is a contributing editor for The American Conservative and a regular columnist on U.S. foreign policy and history at The Libertarian Institute. He is also a frequent contributor to Responsible Statecraft. To support his work or for media or virtual presentation requests, contact him at tedsnider@bell.net.

The Russo-Ukrainian war has featured a parade of escalations on both sides. On the Ukrainian side, each escalation has led to a misguided hope that the next green light or the next wonder weapon will allow Ukraine to win the war. On the Russian side it has been hoped that each escalation will allow Russian forces to focus on the principal task of capturing the remainder of the Donbass. Ukrainian president Zelenskyy’s increasing desperation has led to a situation where he no longer waits for obvious ‘green lights’ from the West – as Western ‘hawks’ continue to push for increasingly direct NATO involvement. Each series of escalations failed to learn the lesson of the last, and each brought the world one step closer to a NATO-Russia war, the one thing both the U.S. and Russia have been trying to avoid.

Presidents Biden and Trump both promised that World War III would not be fought in Ukraine. But they have green-lighted an increasingly permissive series of escalations. Meanwhile European leaders have frequently tripped over each other in their haste to prove their pro-Ukrainian escalatory credentials. Gradually, we have edged towards the possibility of a NATO-Russia war.

As early as November 2022, one of the authors of this piece suggested that “future developments in the war [in Ukraine] are likely to be in the form of an escalation and counter-escalation that will not give either side a decisive advantage.” That assessment was based on high commitment to the war on both sides and the equalizing effect of unprecedented NATO support for Ukraine that came in the comprehensive form of financial support and the supply of weapons, training, targeting and intelligence. That assessment has, unfortunately, proven accurate. Neither side has gained a decisive advantage, and the war has dragged on and cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians, Russians and others who joined the bloodbath.

From the start of the war, the Western press has proffered a pendulum of assessments on possible outcomes to the war, from Ukraine’s imminent collapse, to exaggerated promises of Ukraine’s capability to not only survive but to win on the battlefield, to more realistic pictures of an attritional stalemate, to newfound dreams that dramatic drone strikes mean that Ukraine can still win. Such propagandistic turns ignore the pattern that the war has taken so far, in which both sides have been able to escalate the war and claim some sort of short-term advantage, only to see the other adapt or respond with some sort of counter-escalation.

Escalation has come in many forms. The initial escalation came in the form of force numbers. Ukraine rapidly mobilized forces in the spring of 2022 that quickly saw the initial Russian force of around 200,000 personnel outnumbered and overwhelmed. This escalation was backed up by a more gradual escalation in the sort of equipment that NATO nations were willing to provide to Ukraine – from Western tanks to long range weapons such as ATACMS and Storm Shadow. Initial successes in the use of these new weapons led to waves of euphoria in the Western media that they would allow Ukraine to turn the tide on the battlefield. Quickly, however, Russian forces adapted.

Ukrainian battlefield successes in the late summer and early fall of 2022 made it quite clear to Putin and the Russian leadership they had underestimated Ukrainian resolve and Western willingness to get involved. This realization led Russia to partially mobilize a larger force of its own that allowed it to stabilize the frontline and gradually start to push Ukrainian forces back in the Donbass.

A second, significant series of escalations has come in innovations in drone warfare. The two sides have engaged in an escalation and counter-escalation of drone capabilities and numbers that has seen neither side gain a sustained advantage that could feasibly be ‘decisive’ in influencing the outcome of the war. Despite periods in which Ukrainian forces had a clear advantage in the skies immediately above the heads of both armies, Russia has been able to counter and in some local circumstances ‘out-drone’ Ukraine.

As the battlefield tide has unspectacularly but irreversibly turned in Russia’s favor, Ukrainian morale has been sustained by a series of hopes that the next counter offensive or the next wonder weapon will bring victory. Ukraine’s Western partners have encouraged and accommodated these hopes, and that has created the dangerous escalatory pattern. Each escalation has pushed against another Russian red line. Each crossing of a red line has been accompanied by the hope that Putin is bluffing and won’t enforce his red lines. But Putin has often not bluffed, and each new Western permissiveness of a Ukrainian innovation and each response by Putin has led to the next escalation that brings the world closer to the world war we were promised would not be fought in Ukraine.

Mockery of Putin’s red lines has been foolishly and recklessly arrogant and ignored the historical record. The U.S. supported a coup that that took out the democratically elected president of Ukraine and sponsored a new one who would cooperate with pulling Ukraine closer into the European and NATO security sphere while threatening the ethnic Russian Ukrainians of Crimea and Donbas in 2014. Putin responded by annexing Crimea.

The war itself was the most important enforcing of a red line. “The brightest of all redlines” for Russia, former US ambassador to Russia William Burns said, has always been “Ukrainian entry into NATO” – a warning he issued just before NATO laid out its commitment for Ukraine to become a member in 2008. Moscow made that red line very clear when it delivered its proposals on security guarantees to the U.S. and NATO on the eve of the war on December 17, 2021. The key demand was an end to NATO expansion. Then-NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg has conceded that Putin “wanted us to sign that promise, never to enlarge NATO. . .. We rejected that. So he went to war to prevent NATO, more NATO, close to his borders.” Moscow had warned that a refusal to respect that red line would lead it to respond with “military-technical means.” The invasion of Ukraine was Putin’s enforcing of that red line.

Subsequent Ukrainian escalations in the war might be seen as desperate attempts to find a way of hampering the slow but steady advance of Russian forces in Donbass in the face of increasing manpower shortages. Ukraine’s much-hyped summer counteroffensive of 2023 was certainly the culmination of an escalation of Western support for Ukraine: without Western tanks and other equipment, the offensive could not have taken place.. While Russia had already attacked Ukrainian energy infrastructure, intensification of these attacks was undoubtedly an escalation on the Russian side. “Are strikes on Ukraine’s energy system,” Putin asked, “not an answer to them crossing the red lines?”

In August 2024, Ukraine escalated again with an incursion into Russian territory. The advance into the Kursk region was intended to force Russia to divert troops from Ukrainian territory into Russian territory, relieving pressure from the heavily pressured Donbas front. It failed. It was Ukrainian troops, and not Russian troops, who were diverted from the Donbas front, where the real war was being fought, to Kursk. Able to contain the crisis in Kursk while diverting only limited forces from Donbas, the Russian armed forces exploited the weakened Ukrainian line and pushed further west, further deteriorating and weakening Ukraine’s defenses along the Donbas front and capturing a number of heavily fortified cities.

When the U.S. removed restrictions on Ukraine using its long-range missiles to strike Russian territory in late 2024, Putin said that because long-range strikes into Russia “are impossible to employ without intelligence data from… NATO satellites,” that “mean[s] that NATO countries… are at war with Russia.” And that, Putin said, “will clearly change the very essence, the very nature of the conflict.” It did. For the first time, Russia fired its Oreshnik missile only days later, a highly advanced hypersonic missile and “absolutely new weapon” according to Ted Postol, Professor Emeritus of Science, Technology, and National Security Policy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

As Russian forces continue to slowly but inexorably advance across Donbas, an increasingly desperate Zelenskyy has turned up the heat on escalations in three key hotspots that, if they lead to Russian counter-escalations, could widen the conflict and risk a NATO-Russia war.

Recently, Ukraine has escalated again by further developing and making increased use of capabilities to strike deep into the Russian rear with drones. Dramatic scenes of burning refineries in Russia have hurt the Russian economy, but are, as with Ukraine’s previous escalations, unlikely to be decisive or change the course of the real war being fought in Donbas. Russia will, undoubtedly, shift some emphasis in terms of production and deployment to air defense of the Russian heartland whilst maintaining its grinding advance in the Donbas.

Though Ukraine’s drone escalation is unlikely to change the course of the war, a Russian counter-escalation could. Russia responded with further use of the Oreshnik missile and a warning that it would begin “systematic strikes…. on decision-making centers and command posts,” including underground fortified military command and control centers and bunkers used by the Ukrainian military leadership.” Since those command-and-control centres house NATO officers, such strikes, if they occur, would risk dragging the U.S. and Europe into a NATO-Russia war.

Concerningly, that may be what Zelenskyy is hoping for. Zelenskyy has hardly kept it secret that provoking an escalation from Russia that would lead to NATO’s direct military intervention is Ukraine’s best chance of winning the war.

If Kyiv is the first hotspot, Belarus is the second. Zelenskyy has significantly escalated by threatening to strike Belarus. Zelenskyy has accused Belarus of installing four signal relay stations on communications towers on its territory that assist Russia in directing drones targeting Ukraine. He says Lukashenko “should remove that equipment” and that “If he doesn’t do it, we will,” adding the deadline that “a week is enough for him to do that.”

As always, escalation leads to counter-escalation. Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, has warned that “If necessary, we are ready to take the full range of measures… to ensure the security of our ally.” Once again, a series of escalations risks widening the war and drawing Russia and NATO into direct conflict.

That risk exists in the Baltic countries as well. Ukrainian drones have recently been flying through the airspace of Baltic countries. Russia has accused the Baltic countries of permitting the Ukrainian armed forces to use “air corridors” that reduce flight times to targets deep inside Russia and increase their effectiveness. More escalatory, Russia says it has intelligence indicating that the Baltic states plan to permit the Ukrainian armed forces to launch drones from their territory and that “Ukrainian Armed Forces Unmanned Systems Force personnel have already been deployed to Latvia.”

Putin has warned that “Russia would treat all Ukrainian drone launch sites as legitimate targets, even if they operate from the Baltic states.” The Baltic states are NATO members. Zelenskyy’s actions might be seen as an escalation intended to bring NATO into the war, and, in doing so, finally force NATO to come to Ukraine’s aid with more than supplies, money and positive words.

That is not to say that NATO has not itself already escalated its commitment to Ukraine beyond the early-war escalations in what military equipment it would and would not supply to Ukraine. The provision of a 90 billion Euro loan to Ukraine essentially backed by seized Russian assets, and the recent seizure of vessels of Russia’s ‘shadow fleet’ of oil tankers both certainly represent NATO escalations short of active military participation in direct combat on the ground.

Each escalation fails to learn the lesson of the last and brings Ukraine no closer to victory and the West no closer to its goals. But, bit-by-bit, these escalations and possible escalations edge toward the one thing the U.S. and Russia agreed that they wanted to avoid: the possibility of a NATO-Russia war.

There is an obvious alternative to endless escalation and that is to accept the realities on the ground and that peace will involve Ukraine giving up territory in the Donbass. In such circumstances, Putin would certainly do his best to present the ‘Special Military Operation’ as a success, but the reality would be a very costly way of achieving Moscow’s goals of keeping Ukraine out of NATO and securing protection for ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine. Meanwhile, Ukraine would be getting some sort of accelerated accession to the EU – a consolation of sorts for Zelenskyy choosing to play the Western escalation game rather than seek a more favorable peace back in the spring of 2022.

The alternative – short of the sort of miracle that doesn’t tend to happen in real life – is to continue the slaughter while at the same time inching towards a wider, potentially even more devastating war - one that could still escalate to the use of nuclear weapons.