The predictable and predicted is happening again. Despite the coyly teasing dance of seven veils performed by, mostly, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, to those who ignored the noise and focused on the signal, it’s always been clear that Washington and London would decide to – officially and openly – allow and help Ukraine to use their missiles for attacks even deeper into Russia than before. And of course, it’s been obvious to Moscow as well, as Dmitry Peskov, President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman, made clear as early as September 11.

That the West is escalating is no surprise. It has a well-established pattern of continually ratcheting-up the stakes in its proxy war – including (but not restricted to) the supply of intelligence, mercenaries, ‘advisors’, various tanks, armored vehicles, missile systems, and recently F-16 fighter planes. Now it’s time to fully unleash Storm Shadow and then, if perhaps a little later, long-range ATACMS missiles. What we can safely disregard is the pretext of Iran allegedly shipping short-range ballistic missiles to Russia. It’s either simply untrue or irrelevant.

Tehran denies the American claim. Those ready to scoff at that should recall that the West has a rock-solid record of making things up, from Iraqi WMDs to Israel’s legally strictly non-existing ‘right’ to defend itself against those it occupies and genocides. And even if Iran has handed over missiles – as, by the way, it would have an actual right to do as a sovereign state – that is not why this specific Western escalation is occurring now.

The real reason why the restrictions on the use of Western missiles are coming off at this point in the war is that Kiev is even more desperate than usual. With Russia first containing Kiev’s Kursk Kamikaze incursion and now launching devastating counter-attacks, the Ukrainian operation has turned into the bloody waste it was destined to be, while Moscow’s forces are accelerating their advances elsewhere, as even the stalwartly pro-Kiev New York Times is admitting.

Not that adding deeper missile strikes will save the Zelensky regime from defeat and probably collapse. For one thing, Ukraine does not have a large supply of these weapons, and given Western politics and lack of production capacities, it never will. Kiev may get lucky and do some limited damage, but – as with earlier silver bullets – the missiles cannot change the course of the war. Russian countermeasures will greatly blunt their impact in any case. But the Zelensky regime has a habit of clinging to one straw after the other.........

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