The News
Russian President Vladimir Putin formally lowered the threshold for Moscow’s deployment of nuclear weapons on Tuesday, seemingly in response to the US loosening restrictions on Ukraine’s use of long-range weapons to strike deep inside Russian territory.
Separately, Russia also claimed that Ukraine had fired six US-supplied long-range missiles at a military facility in the Bryansk border region, Russian state media reported, in what would be the first such attack since Washington announced a policy shift.
Russia will now regard any attack by a non-nuclear country supported by a nuclear power as a joint attack, and “reserves the right to consider a nuclear response,” the Russian state news agency TASS reported. Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said any potential adversary must understand the “inevitability of retribution” for actions taken against Russia and its allies.
SIGNALS
Hopes of Ukraine winning the war are starting to fade
Ukraine launched a surprise counter-offensive in the Kursk region of Russia in August, but its foothold is “shrinking,” Meduza reported, while Russia is making progress in the Donbas. Loss of territory is one thing, but the bigger problem is an increasingly weak and overstretched Ukrainian army, The Economist argued. Russia isn’t in good shape either, but the fear among Western officials is that “Ukraine’s breaking point will come first,” the outlet wrote. Military experts have welcomed outgoing US President Joe Biden’s loosening of restrictions on Ukraine’s use of US-supplied weapons, but say the decision will at best restore a little balance to the war rather than win it for Ukraine, the BBC reported.
As war-weariness grows, conscription tactics are getting dirtier
Ukraine’s population appears to be increasingly war-weary as the conflict marked its 1,000th day: New Gallup research showed that a slim majority of Ukrainians favored a negotiated end to the war as soon as possible, up from 27% in 2023. With more and more people trying to dodge the draft, conscription tactics are becoming increasingly “deceitful, coercive and violent” as Ukraine tries to add a further 200,000 troops by the end of the year, The Times of London reported. So-called “conscription squads” roam the streets of Odesa — one of the “worst regions” when it comes to meeting targets, according to a local conscription officer — in search of those in hiding, and some authorities have resorted to illegally detaining men for conscription, including those who should be exempt.
The conflict is changing modern warfare
The nearly three-year war has brought an automation boom in Ukraine, and turned the country’s military industry into the “fastest innovating sector in the entire world,” a Ukrainian lawmaker told Reuters. Most of its more than 800 defense production companies were formed in response to the 2022 Russian invasion, producing drones and using artificial intelligence to develop military tech. Thanks to some of those new technologies, the battlefield has become more “transparent,” a former US army brigadier general argued in Politico: It’s now near-impossible for either military to hide their resources from the eyes of the enemy.