An attack on Poland would be Putin’s last fail

The US has warned Poland that Russia was plotting to attack it in a “few months” time, which would be the fastest way to end the Ukraine war, in president Vladimir Putin’s ultimate fail.

The attack could be a small ground incursion from Kaliningrad or Belarus or a missile strike on Polish critical infrastructure, US intelligence said, according to Polish and British media.

Its objective would be to kill Nato, by showing the US did not honour Article V, and to scare EU populations.

I am Polish and it sent a shiver down my spine.

It reminded me of the US warnings ahead of 24 February 2022 that Putin was about to fully invade Ukraine. 

And it would be in line with his strategy so far: fail, so escalate.

He failed to cause regime change in Ukraine via political subversion, so he escalated with a military invasion.

He is now failing in the Ukraine war, so he starts a continental war, no doubt accompanied by nuclear sabre-rattling, to try to get his way, the logic goes.

But the more I thought about it, the surer I was this would spell his doom. 

Even if US president Donald Trump pulled American forces out of Poland and gave Putin a wink on Article V, Poland has the third-largest army in Nato and by far the best-funded one, in terms of GDP percentage. 

It fortified its Kaliningrad and Belarus borders years ago. 

And even if France, Germany, Italy, and Spain also proved wobbly on Article V, I believe the UK, Nordic, and Baltic states, as well as Ukraine, would immediately help Poland to repel Russia and hit back.  

Meanwhile, Putin’s military and economy have been exhausted by five years of Ukraine losses and by Western sanctions.  

The Russian emperor would march home from Poland not just with no clothes on, but also with a bloodied nose, Nato or no Nato. 

All of his Global South allies, including Brazil, China, India, and South America, would dump him, as I doubt that China’s Xi Jinping, for one, would be happy for the world economy to go up in flames in World War III, just to help a geriatric Russian loser cling to power a bit longer. 

If Putin's Nato war also failed, the only step left on the escalation ladder was a nuclear strike. 

He could fire a little nuclear bomb at a rock in the Arctic Ocean, for instance, to terrorise the West into capitulation and to look like a boss. 

But unlike the conventional ladder, nuclear escalation is much harder to manage. 

The minute Putin’s '12th GUMO' nuclear forces began taking warheads from storage to mate them with missiles, or his nuclear submarines started surging out from Murmansk in the Barents Sea, Western intelligence would know, but they would not know how little his bombs were going to be or where he was going to drop them, quite possibly leading Pentagon hotheads to push Trump into a first strike, just to be on the safe side. 

If I know this from interviews with ex-Nato officials, then Putin and his generals know it too, while Russian people today are not so illiterate and poor as they used to be that they would gladly join his funeral pyre. 

And all this is why I’m optimistic that his cycle of fail, so escalate, is shortly going to end with Putin’s ultimate fail (his fall from power), and not the ultimate global conflagration.