It’s not yet World War Three – but ‘World War Z’ has begun

Time was when optimists responded to the imminence of world war with a cocky: “It’ll all be over by Christmas…”

Since President Biden’s foreign policy team leaked his decision yesterday to let Ukraine use US-supplied long-range missiles to strike military targets within Russia, pessimists have been warning that World War Three will start by Christmas.

The Russians certainly have been issuing blood-curdling warnings that any Western permission to Ukraine to use Nato-supplied rockets to attack Russia itself would trigger a terrible response.

The deterrent effect of the Kremlin’s threats had worked with the German chancellor, Olaf Scholtz, who pointedly repeated his refusal to send Germany’s Taurus cruise missile to Ukraine – and went on to telephone President Putin for the first time in more than two years.

Our prime minister, however, has not only repeated his support for Ukraine, but Sir Keir Starmer seems to have anticipated Biden’s decision by authorising British-supplied Storm Shadow cruise missiles to make similar strikes against the Russian air bases and bunkers used to launch the recent wave of devastating airstrikes on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure.

What makes authorising these new missiles and expanding the range of the authorised targets more sensitive than other types of weapons supplies is that the long-range weapons, known as ATACMS (short for Army Tactical Missile System), use intelligence from US satellites to find their targets.

The UK’s Storm Shadows use similar targeting information supplied by our intelligence on Russian deployments. Back in September, President Putin threatened to use this reality – that the Ukrainians can’t target these Nato-supplied missiles without US or British personnel having an active involvement in the war – to claim the West itself would be at war with Russia.

In reality, what for the Ukrainians is a war of national defence, and for Putin, whatever his blather, a war of conquest, is for Nato countries a proxy war against the alliance’s Eurasian geopolitical mega-rival.

Putin’s drawing on North Korean munitions and now that hyper-militarised tyranny’s soldiers is a symptom of how the war in Ukraine is taking on a global character.

Maybe it is not World War Three yet, but let’s call it “World War Z” – pronounced in the American way, and referencing the “Z” symbol (short for “Zapad”, “west” in Russian) which the Russian army painted on its vehicles at the start of the war when they invaded in February 2022, a full 1,000 days ago.

A motley range of volunteers have gone to fight for Ukraine from Western countries, but also post-Soviet republics with a strong anti-Russian tradition, such as Georgia; and even some anti-Putin Russians. This foreign legion supplies a relatively small number of troops and their proud brigade names inflate their battlefield impact.

As many as 10,000 North Korean troops – roughly one division strong – are being deployed  to support the Russian army’s counteroffensive against the Ukrainian troops who had seized a chunk of Russian territory in the Kursk region. Korean boots on the ground is a major internationalisation of the war.

Potential problems haunt hopes that the White House’s decision on ATACMS will be a game-changer.

Often overlooked is how few of these sophisticated weapons systems the Pentagon has available to deploy to Ukraine. As with its Patriot anti-missile systems, the Pentagon has to keep them in reserve for other potential trouble zones – above all, Taiwan and China’s activities in the South China Sea.

Although the war in Ukraine has been going for a thousand days, the Western countries have not seriously ramped up production of these sophisticated weapons systems. Putin presumably calculates that Russia can roll with any blows in the short term, and hit back with its own boosted production of glide bombs and hypersonic missiles.

Above all, Donald Trump’s re-election has raised questions about Washington’s commitment to stand behind Ukraine “as long as it takes”. President Zelensky says that he thinks Trump could pressure Putin more effectively than Joe Biden has. Maybe – but Trump’s team were suggesting the sudden reversal of policy by the outgoing president could be a “spoiler” to disrupt the next president’s peace plan.

If the President-elect was planning to make Putin an offer he can’t refuse – take Crimea and the currently occupied land, but not more, or face expanded American support for Kyiv – Biden had stolen his thunder.

Many of Trump’s Maga supporters are deeply suspicious of Biden’s twelfth-hour change of heart. Donald Trump Jr has voiced his displeasure at Biden’s decision, suggesting it was designed to thwart his father’s “peace plan”. Die-hard Democrats, for their part, are reviving the Russiagate charges that Trump Sr is Putin’s “poodle”.

The intertwining of the war in Ukraine with internal politics in the United States could be the most acute symptom of the globalised proxy war underway between Russia and its allies on one side and the West on the other.

Everyone waits to see which side Donald Trump takes. The outcome of World War Z depends on him more than anyone else.

Mark Almond is director of the Crisis Research Institute, Oxford