What's next in Ukraine?

From another author that I may not agree with but worth sharing:

"Every European country that borders Russia is preparing for a wider war in the event of a Russian victory in Ukraine." Reporter at Large, Ben Taub? New Yorker?

?"Most Western governments do not appear to think of themselves as being at war with Russia. Russia, however, is at war with the West. “That’s for sure—we are saying that openly,” the Russian representative to the United Nations recently declared.?

?Most attacks are deliberately murky, and difficult to attribute. They are acts of so-called hybrid warfare, designed to subdue the enemy without fighting. The strategy appears to be to push the limits of what Russia can get away with—to subvert, to sabotage, to hack, to destabilize, to instill fear—and to paralyze Western governments by hinting at even more aggressive tactics.?

?“They do it because they can do it,” an air-traffic controller told me, of an electronic-warfare attack that imperils civilian aviation. “Then they deny everything, and they threaten you, saying that, if you don’t stop accusing them of what you know they’re doing, bad things will happen to you.”

?Ever since Russia annexed Crimea, in 2014, its military and intelligence services have been experimenting with hybrid warfare and influence operations in Kirkenes, treating the area as “a laboratory,” as the regional police chief put it to me. Some attacks were almost imperceptible at first; others disrupted everyday life and caused division among locals. To understand what was happening in her district, she started reading Sun Tzu.

?Countries throughout Europe now acknowledge that their people and infrastructure are under ceaseless attack. Yet each incident is, by itself, below the threshold that would require a military response or trigger Article 5.?

?In recent months, agents of Russian intelligence are believed to have assassinated a defector in Spain, planted explosives near a pipeline in Germany, carried out arson attacks all over the Continent, and sabotaged subsea cables and rail lines. A Russian operative injured himself in Paris while preparing explosives for a terrorist attack on a hardware store, and U.S. intelligence discovered a Russian plot to assassinate the C.E.O. of one of Europe’s largest arms manufacturers.?

?Poland’s interior minister said, “We are facing a foreign state that is conducting hostile and—in military parlance—kinetic action on Polish territory.”?

?Every European country that borders Russia is preparing for a wider war in the event of a Russian victory in Ukraine. Poland and the Baltics are digging trenches at their borders and fortifying them, often with antitank obstacles known as “dragon’s teeth.” Finland cast aside seventy years of neutrality and nonalignment to join NATO; Sweden cast aside two hundred.

?Russia’s low-grade attacks are accompanied by threats of nuclear annihilation, both by Kremlin officials and by pundits on state television. In May, the Russian military carried out an exercise in which it practiced initiating a tactical nuclear war. In the context of nuclear escalation, Kirkenes is in one of the most strategically sensitive regions on earth. The other side of the border is the Kola Peninsula, which is filled with closed military towns and airfields, nuclear-weapons storage facilities, and nuclear-submarine ports. “Within a radius of, let’s say, two hundred kilometres of this table, there could be a thousand nuclear warheads,” Thomas Nilsen, a journalist in Kirkenes, told me, over a dinner of reindeer and arctic char. Russia is also using the Barents Sea for research and development of new delivery systems for nuclear weapons, including a subsea nuclear torpedo that could flood a coastal city with a radioactive tsunami, and a nuclear-powered cruise missile with global reach."