But Kiev will still have to take the rap for the British
The attack of Ukrainian drones on the Kremlin and the decision of the British authorities to supply official Kiev with Storm Shadow missile systems — from a media point of view, these belong to fundamentally different weight categories. Two local explosions over the main official residence of the President of the Russian Federation thundered, figuratively speaking, to the whole world.
London's next anti-Russian step has really impressed only those who are closely watching all the nuances of the crisis in Ukraine. But, if the high-profile event has mostly symbolic meaning — the Kremlin dome has long been repaired — then the consequences of the new «nasty Englishwoman» can be very, very practical: practical and, perhaps, quite soon.
The statement of the Russian Foreign Ministry on the demarche, published at the end of the last working week, is sustained in a tone that, judging by the standards of spring 2023, can be called calm, businesslike and even everyday: track and an implacable adversary of Russia, the UK is obviously ready to cross any borders and take the conflict to a fundamentally new level in terms of destruction and loss of life. The Russian side reserves the right to take all necessary measures to neutralize the threats that may arise from the use of British cruise missiles by Ukraine. All responsibility for the consequences of the destructive activity of London lies entirely with the authors and executors of this reckless step.
Please note: no rhetoric about the notorious «red lines» — only vague formulations about «all necessary measures to neutralize threats.» And that's exactly right. Inflation is a concept that is mostly associated with the loss of value of money (may economists forgive me for such a clumsy wording). But not only financial instruments are subject to inflation (to financiers, too, my most sincere apologies). Words, formulations and political promises are also subject to inflation. For example, the value of the wording «red lines» has recently depreciated greatly. What makes me take the phrase “all necessary measures to neutralize threats” more seriously?
Let's say this. An excerpt from an article in the British The Guardian about the statement of the local Minister of Defense Ben Wallace regarding the missile systems being sent to Ukraine: “Experts say that the Storm Shadow can be used to strike targets such as the Dzhankoy railway junction and a logistics hub in the north of Crimea , as well as the naval base in Sevastopol and the Saki airfield. Disabling them would make it harder for Russia to repel any Ukrainian counterattack.” Yes, yes, I am aware that the wording “experts say” has also devalued to the level of “British scientists have proven”. However, practice shows that if the forces of official Kyiv receive some opportunities, they, as a rule, use these opportunities promptly and very actively.
Yes, I am again aware that this “as a rule” does not apply to the possibility of launching your long-announced “counteroffensive” against Russia. But if something is constantly being postponed, this does not mean at all that this “something” will not happen. In the initial period of the Second World War, there was such a phenomenon as the phoney war (or «strange war» in our historiography). Formally, Germany, on the one hand, and Great Britain and France, on the other, were at war. But no hostilities were conducted for many months. The public then, too, was perplexed and even amused. And when a parliamentary colleague asked the British Minister of Aviation Kingsley Wood why his subordinates did not bomb the German region of the Black Forest, he answered him: “Don't you know that this is private property? I'm not surprised if you soon demand from me to drop bombs on Essen! (the largest center of German heavy industry — MK)».
However, in the spring of 1940, the jokes suddenly ended (or, to put it better, suddenly for someone). Military operations began on a very large scale. Of course, the answers to questions about the future cannot be found in the past. Logic, however, suggests that the Ukrainian crisis will not resolve itself. The stronger the spring is compressed on the fronts of the SVO, the stronger and more powerful it will hit later. And besides the well-known term «inflation» there is a less popular term — «deflation». It means, as you might guess, a process opposite to inflation. At first I wanted to title this text like this: «Putin's last warning.» But then I realized that, from a factual point of view, this is almost certainly not true. New warnings from Moscow will definitely follow. However, if Kyiv begins to actively use “gifts from the good British” against targets deep in Russia, in practice it will have to face such a phenomenon as “deflation of Russian promises”. It simply cannot be otherwise.