No cause for gloating: that is why Putin’s humiliation is so dangerous for Kiev

For all the gloating over Putin’s moment of weakness, one should not forget that the brutality of the Russian troops has not changed. On the contrary: the Russian threat to Ukraine and Europe has actually grown – for these five reasons:

The Belarusian town of Mahilyow will be the new home for 8,000 Wagner mercenaries, the opposition platform Nexta writes. So Prigozhin and thousands of his fighters move permanently to the empire of Alexander Lukashenko (68). This is bad news for Kiev.

The Ukrainian capital is only 130 kilometers from the Belarusian border. Putin’s forces from the north launched the first major attack on the metropolis in February 2022. This scenario could now repeat itself, suspects British ex-general Richard Dannatt (72) in an interview with ‘Sky News’.

Ukraine will have to send some of its troops back to the Belarusian border from Donbass and the south. This weakens their effectiveness on the main battlefields of the war.

The use of nuclear bombs is one of the last red lines that Putin has yet to cross. In the aftermath of the Prigozhin uprising, which Russian propagandists like to present as a Western maneuver in disguise, radical circles in Moscow are now calling for the use of nuclear weapons. Among them was Putin adviser Sergey Karaganov (70), who is already speculating on who should attack Moscow first with nuclear weapons.

But Russian nuclear bombs are not the only nuclear threat. According to Ukrainian intelligence, the Russians have loaded four of the six reactors at the Zaporizhia nuclear power plant (the largest in Europe) with explosives. An explosion at the occupied nuclear power plant would have devastating consequences for all of Europe.

Encouraged by the chaos in Moscow, the Ukrainians have stepped up their counter-offensive. According to the formerly always reliable YouTube channel “Military Summary”, the army of Volodymyr Zelensky (45) lost more than 400 soldiers in the fighting in the outskirts of the Donbass city of Donetsk alone – without making any territorial gains.

The problem: military science assumes that, depending on the terrain, it takes three to ten times more soldiers to occupy an area than to defend it. The bloody toll Ukraine will have to pay to conquer Russian defenses along the war front will be staggering.

Putin is a master of distraction. The 70-year-old often responded to challenges with violent acts to distract the home crowd. For example, even before his election as president in September 1999, then-Prime Minister Putin allegedly carried out several bomb attacks on apartment buildings in Moscow and other Russian cities.

The unpopular Putin accused Chechen terrorists of attacks and started the second Chechen war (1999 to 2009). This allowed him to present himself as a patriotic leader. His popularity numbers increased astonishingly. He was sure of being elected president.

There is little doubt that Putin will respond to the latest internal insecurity with brutal diversions to reassert himself as a strongman.

The transfer of the Wagner troops to Belarus increases the risk of a direct confrontation between Russian fighters and NATO. The two neighboring Belarusian countries, Lithuania and Poland, have announced that they will secure their borders with Prigozhin’s newly adopted country. And Germany has promised to send an additional 4,000 soldiers to reinforce NATO’s eastern flank in the Baltics.

Even if the Wagner troops had no chance militarily against the heavily armed NATO units, the world cannot afford a direct confrontation between the Western military alliance and the nuclear power Russia.