The United States and Russia have agreed on little in the war in Ukraine. The one thing they have agreed on is the existential necessity of avoiding a direct war between NATO and Russia, which could become a third world war or even a nuclear war.
At the beginning of November 2021, three and a half months before the war began, then-CIA Director William Burns spoke to Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, and the two laid out what the boundaries of the proxy war would be. Newsweek reported the “rules of the road” to be these: “The United States would not fight directly nor seek regime change,” and “Russia would limit its assault to Ukraine.” The U.S. wouldn’t attack Russia, and Russia would not attack NATO.
After Russia’s invasion began, the U.S. adopted a reckless policy of escalatory participation that aimed to fall just shy of the sort of direct fighting that would draw Russia into a war with NATO. And Russia exercised restraint in its responses to those escalations in order to avoid drawing NATO into a war with Russia.
The possibility of that caution failing is now at perhaps the highest level it has been at any time of the war. One flashpoint for a wider war is the Baltic states, while another is actually inside Ukraine, in the capital Kiev, which hosts American and European diplomats and military officers.
Last month, a Romanian F-16 fighter jet based in Lithuania shot down a Ukrainian drone in Estonian airspace after it had flown through Latvian airspace. It was not the first Ukrainian drone to have recently flown through the airspace of the Baltic countries. The Baltic nations, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, are NATO members.
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