On Tuesday, just hours after Ukraine appeared to have fired U.S.-made ballistic missiles into Russia — likely for the first time — the Kremlin published changes to its nuclear doctrine, lowering the threshold for what would justify a nuclear response.
The changes, which the Kremlin said were developed over several months, state that Russia will consider using nuclear weapons if its sovereignty is critically threatened by a conventional weapon with the support of a nuclear power.
“The enemy must understand the inevitability of retaliation for aggression against the Russian Federation;” said Dmitry Peskov, the spokesperson for the Kremlin, during a regular press teleconference on Tuesday.
An unnamed U.S. official told Reuters it was the first time the ATACMS were used by Ukraine inside Russia.
Russian state media reported Ukraine fired six ballistic missiles at a facility in the Bryansk region overnight. Without offering evidence, RIA Novosti said Russia’s air defence system shot down five of the missiles and damaged a sixth, which fell on the territory of the facility, sparking a fire that was extinguished.
Ukrainian media reported the missiles hit a weapons depot located 110 kilometres from its border with Russia.
An unspecified number of ATACMS (or Army Tactical Missile System) units were delivered to Ukraine last year. But the outgoing administration of U.S. President Joe Biden just reversed its policy and is now allowing Ukraine to fire the weapons deeper into Russia.
Tatiana Stanovaya, a Russian political analyst and founder of R. Politik, an analysis firm, says Russia’s decision to publish its nuclear doctrine on Tuesday was deliberately timed to respond to the ATACMS decision.
“This marks an extraordinarily dangerous juncture,” she wrote CBC News over the messaging app Telegram.
“The current situation offers Putin a significant temptation to escalate. With Trump not yet in office, such a move would not interfere with any immediate peace initiatives, but could instead reinforce Trump’s argument for direct dialogue with Putin.”
‘The catalyst of the escalation’
U.S. president-elect Donald Trump has repeatedly vowed to end the war in Ukraine quickly, without offering any specifics.
Stanovaya believes Russia calculated its response in an effort to try and deter Ukraine from using the missiles, and push blame toward Biden for “being the catalyst of the escalation.”
Ukrainian officials and Western analysts believe the missiles, which have a maximum range of 300 kilometres, aren’t likely to lead to a dramatic shift on the ground, because Ukraine has a limited number of weapons systems and Russia has redeployed many of its helicopters and bombers to airbases out of ATACMS range.
But according to the U.S.-based Institute for the Study of War, there are still hundreds of other Russian military targets in range of the weapons.
Ukraine received the ATACMS last October, and for the past several months it has pleaded to be allowed to use them more freely. Political observers believe the U.S. granted the permission now, because thousands of North Korean troops have been deployed to Russia’s Kursk region for an anticipated counter-offensive.
In a surprise push in August, Ukraine captured an estimated 1,200 square kilometres in the Kursk region.
Now, 1,000 days into Russia’s full-scale invasion, its military, bolstered with North Korean recruits, appears positioned to try and take the territory back.
“The situation is quite tense … the enemy is trying to oust us … but at the moment, they are not able to,” said a Ukrainian soldier who CBC News agreed to only identify as Wolverine, due to security concerns.
Wolverine, who spent two months fighting in Kursk, spoke to CBC News from the Sumy region, where he was on leave but preparing to head back into battle.
He described the recent ATACMS decision as “better late than never.” But he says the fact it was a long time coming, and that it has been so widely reported, has removed any element of surprise.
“The enemy can prepare and simply move its airfields, warehouses … move its parts all to safe places where the weapons cannot reach.”
Months of negotiations
Throughout the war, Ukraine’s Western allies have grown increasingly comfortable supplying Kyiv with more powerful and deadlier weapons, despite concerns that it could escalate the conflict.
Earlier in the war, there were negotiations over supplying Western-built tanks. Ukraine pleaded for F-16 fighter jets for months, before the jets started arriving this summer.
According to Matthew Savill, military sciences director for the London-based Royal United Services Institute, the impact of the ATACMS would have been greater had Ukraine been given the weapons and permission to fire them into Russia from the outset.
In a written press briefing, Savill noted the Russian planes launching glide-bombs and cruise missiles at Ukrainian cities are largely stationed out of ATACMS range, with some parked 1,000 km away from the border. However, he says ATACMS would still be able target supply hubs, headquarters and ammunition depots.
“It may help the Ukrainians fight to hold on to the Kursk incursion … and inflict casualties on those North Korean forces that are now operating inside Russia,” Savill wrote.
“The impact [of the ATACMS decision] may be more political, albeit with a narrowing window of opportunity.”
Ukraine’s response
Speaking to reporters in Kyiv on Tuesday, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy didn’t confirm the overnight strike, but said the country has ATACMS and “will use them, all of them.”
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, speaking in Kyiv on the 1,000th day of war, says Russian President Vladimir Putin wants to destroy Ukraine and ‘make chaos in the world.’
During the joint news conference with Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, Zelenskyy responded to Russia’s ramped-up nuclear policy and urged Germany to supply Kyiv with Taurus long-range missiles, which it has been hesitant to do.
“I think after statements about nuclear weapons, it is also time for Germany to support corresponding decisions,” Zelenskyy said.
France and Britain have not yet confirmed whether they will follow the Americans by allowing Ukraine to fire their Storm Shadow/SCALP cruise missiles into Russia. The missiles have a range of 250 km.
The Kremlin’s response follows a familiar pattern — it’s claiming that NATO was trying to escalate the war with a provocation that was akin to “throwing fuel on a fire.”
The headline on the Tuesday morning broadcast of the state media news program 60 Minutes said, “If there is an attack on Russia territory, this means a direct attack by NATO.”
Throughout the war, Russia has routinely accused NATO, and specifically the U.S., of waging a fight against Russia.
“We are very much hopeful that Trump’s people, and he himself, can overturn this decision,” said Maria Butina, a Russian MP who spoke to CBC News over Zoom.
Butina, who was convicted in the U.S. of being a covert agent, told CBC she believes the U.S. is close to pushing the conflict toward “World War Three,” but would not comment on or even acknowledge that Russia has imported thousands of North Korean soldiers.
Reuters reported on Tuesday that Russia has begun serial production of mobile bomb shelters that can withstand a variety of threats, including shockwaves and radiation from a nuclear blast.
Butina says Biden’s reversal on the use of ATACMS raises the stakes, noting that the U.S. and Russia are nuclear powers.
“While these big guys are playing politics in the United States, they don’t fully realize that actually it could be the end for the whole human race.”
Published at Tue, 19 Nov 2024 16:47:29 +0000
He was an IDF officer but now he says he’d rather go to jail than participate in the Gaza war
This time last year, Michael Ofer-Ziv was halfway through his military work on the war in Gaza. The reservist was called up a week after the devastating Hamas-led attack on southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
The 29-year-old says he was torn about whether to serve with the Israel Defence Forces or not. A self-proclaimed leftist, he says he was abroad when the call came, and was hesitant to accept. But emotions among friends and family were running high. His family knew some of the victims killed at the site of the Nova music festival, one of the areas the militants had targeted.
So Ofer-Ziv reported for duty on Oct. 13, 2023, serving as a control officer for the next two months out of Sde Teiman, a military base in the Negev desert in southern Israel, near the border with Gaza.
“As a lefty, I do not believe that military action will solve anything in the long term,” he said during an interview with CBC News.
“But it was very clear that in the short term, there was a need to re-establish the border to protect civilians on our side.”
However, even during his term, his apprehension toward the military’s stated goals for the war remained in the back of his mind. In June, after a break, he officially refused to return — a decision that could mean jail time.
Ofer-Ziv is now among over 100 Israeli servicemen and women who have signed a petition addressed to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, refusing to return to service without an immediate ceasefire deal in Gaza and return of the Israeli hostages who remain there. The letter, which is still collecting signatures, had reached 165 at time of publication.
Conscientious objectors — also called refusers or refuseniks in Israel — reject the mandatory call to service over moral or political grounds, and can face jail time for their actions. Though they remain a minority of the population, the country has seen recent high-profile cases of young refusers.
Netanyahu’s office declined to comment to CBC on the letter and on refusers protesting the war in Gaza.
The IDF said in a statement that any narrative suggesting an uptick in refuseniks is “false,” and that the cases described are “marginal.”
“Since the outbreak of the war, hundreds of thousands of reservists have been called up, some of whom continue to be actively deployed even now.”
The tipping point
Ofer-Ziv was part of the brigade command unit, which controls the movement of troops in the battlefield. He was stationed in a “war room” at Sde Teiman, where he would monitor a portion of the ground operations in Gaza live through screens. He described it as the “cool-headed” team driving the fight on the ground.
(Sde Teiman would later gain infamy, as it was partially converted into a detention camp during the war and faced allegations of IDF soldiers abusing Palestinian detainees. Ofer-Ziv was not involved with the detention camp operations.)
He said he couldn’t share too many details of his time there, but said it was an environment where officers were constantly debating where, who and what to strike next. And between those debates and the high-stress environment he was in, compounded by a lack of sleep and separation from his family, Ofer-Ziv says making decisions was difficult.
He also felt that, while troops were never told to target civilians in Gaza, many didn’t see the accidental killings of civilians as a big deal.
“The general sentiment is this disregard [for] Palestinian lives: It’s not as important of a thing that we should talk about or care about that much,” he said.
The thinking was “we should avoid it when we can, but it’s not something that we should work really hard to avoid.”
Part of what kept Ofer-Ziv in that war room was a belief that a ceasefire deal was imminent. And he believed the presence of someone who was more critical of the war could make an impact on the decisions made.
“I really believe that when I was there, I made a bit of a difference,” Ofer-Ziv said. “In many cases, the decision not to fire, I had a part [in] making that decision.”
But the tipping point was in December 2023, when the IDF mistakenly killed three Israeli hostages in northern Gaza.
“At the time, we already had this concept that the military pressure is killing hostages, rather than making a reality for a deal,” he said.
He was given a routine break that month, and by the next month, he had already decided not to return.
Regarding any wrongdoing on the battlefield, the Israeli army told CBC it had referred nearly 2,000 such cases to the General Staff Fact-Finding and Assessment Mechanism, an independent body, for review.
No soldiers, no war
Mattan Helman refused to enlist with the IDF in 2007, and spent over 100 days in jail. Now, as executive director of Refuser.org, he works to support fellow refusers and their efforts to resist Israeli military action in the broader Middle East.
An international organization, Refuser.org funds refusers’ legal fees, and also supports their press and social media campaigns about war resistance.
“This kind of initiative of soldiers is resistance,” he told CBC News. “The work cannot go on without soldiers to continue the war.”
Though they are a minority, refuser movements have gained some traction in the past. Yesh Gvul — which roughly translates to “There is a limit” — is one of them, created at the start of the 1982 Lebanon War by Israeli veterans who refused to serve in the military. Nearly 3,000 reservists signed the petition against invading Lebanon, according to its website.
Shimri Zameret, the chair of Refuser.org’s board who has also spent time in jail for refusing to serve, says it’s difficult to reject military service in Israeli society.
Though there are exemptions, most Israeli citizens are required to serve in the military once they turn 18 — men for at least 32 months and women at least 24. After that, they’re typically required to be part of the reserve force, where they’re not always on active duty but can be called up for emergencies.
It’s not just the legal requirement that makes refusing difficult, however. Many refuseniks keep it to themselves, Zameret says, because they fear reprisal from their family and friends, as serving in the military is an important part of Israeli society.
“Most of them don’t understand that they’re doing atrocities because they are told by their societies, they are socialized to believe that what they’re doing is protecting their society,” he said.
“So this is the cognitive dissonance, where soldiers are going and they’re doing this thing that they believe is for protection.”
A top Israeli cabinet minister has signalled the country is preparing to annex 150 settlements in the occupied West Bank, sparked in part by Donald Trump’s imminent return to the White House. But such a move could also hinder any prospective peace process.
Possible jail time
Ofer-Ziv officially refused military duty when he was called up again in June.
He was then notified that he was suspended from military service shortly after signing two refusal petitions. There was an attempt to sway him to remove his signature from them.
He says he believes the government is hoping to keep the activities of refuseniks like him quiet. But he is adamant about his decision, he says.
“I participated in occupation for, let’s say, four years, when I was in mandatory service. I participated in the occupation every day,” he said.
“I live in Israel. I pay taxes [that] go to the West Bank, they go to occupation. So, the way I see it, it’s me paying my dues….
“[And] this is what I can do to pay back for what I did.”
He could face jail time, though he says he may not find out until after the war ends. But Ofer-Ziv says he’s at peace with any punishment that he may have to face as a result of his outspoken objection to the war in Gaza.
“I’d rather sit in jail than participate in this war.”
Published at Tue, 19 Nov 2024 09:00:00 +0000
