Putin’s alarming message is that nuclear arms race has been renewed

Last week’s visit by US President Joe Biden to Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, was a bit of an anti-climax. He sort of sneaked in, obviously due to security concerns. He had flown from Washington DC and landed in Warsaw, Poland.

The shades on every window of the plane had been pulled down. Then he took an incognito train to Kyiv where he met President Volodymyr Zelensky amid suffocating security.

Only then did two American journalists invited on the flight realise the VVIP passenger was none other than President Biden. The overland route the US leader took from Warsaw to Kyiv was symbolic. It is through there that billions of dollars worth of armaments and munitions are being funnelled from the US and her NATO allies to back Ukraine’s fight against Russia.

Biden’s visit was to mark a year since Russia invaded Ukraine. He had come to assure Zelensky that America would stand with Ukraine to the hilt. The two leaders made an odd pair. One unshaven, dressed in his now familiar greenish military fatigues while the other was in a prim blue suit and winter overcoat.

Ululating rhetoric

Biden’s ululating rhetoric was spared for Warsaw on his way back home. I guess there was no fear there of a stray Russian missile landing on the US presidential convoy. Here was the self-proclaimed all-conquering hero assuring nervous Eastern Europe that Russia will be defeated. 

“[Russian President Vladimir] Putin thinks autocrats like him are tough but he faces the iron will of the US and NATO,” he told a cheering crowd. 

Whereas Biden’s wife Jill was preparing for a trip to Africa on mundane family empowerment issues, the husband was making a speech he expected would define his place in history.

In the West — the US and Britain in particular — a leader is considered to have cojones if he prosecutes a war successfully, even if it’s against a banana outfit like Grenada (Ronald Reagan), or an obviously lopsided and stage-managed conflict whose outcome is predetermined such as the Iraq war (George W. Bush).

But beware, Russia is not Iraq, leave aside Grenada. It can destroy the world if pushed to the wall. It doesn’t have NATO’s conventional firepower, but it has the ultimate weapons— nuclear — that only America has in roughly equal measure.

Meanwhile, in Moscow, President Putin was reading from a totally different script. Addressing the Russian parliament, he vowed there would be no compromise with Zelensky over the Ukrainian territories the Russian military has occupied and annexed.

He made it absolutely clear that from the trajectory of events, NATO was now directly fighting Russia using Ukraine as a proxy. Then he made a startling declaration. He stated Russia was withdrawing forthwith from the landmark nuclear arms control agreement signed with America in 1990. 

The agreement put a cap on the number of nuclear warheads and delivery systems each power has in its arsenal. Basically, Putin was saying, alarmingly, that the nuclear arms race has been renewed without restraint. More dangerously, he was dangling the nuclear card to NATO.

Terrible reality

I doubt Russia can outspend America in this new race. But the truth of the matter is that even if you have a vial of cyanide, it will kill — whether the other person has two or three vials is irrelevant. It’s a terrible reality. Just one vial and we’re over. Even those disinterested in the conflict.

The fact is, many wars have broken out over miscalculation, not necessarily by design. When an unknown Serbian hothead assassinated the Archduke of Austria in 1914, little did he know he’d unleashed forces that led to a major global war that sucked in Austria-Hungary, Germany and the Ottomans on one side and Britain, France and Italy on the other— and all their colonies. It became the First World War. Who remembers the Serb zealot?

Zelensky has been pestering Biden and everybody else about giving him weapons. The latest is his demand for advanced F16 jet fighters. Biden is resisting this. Well, he had resisted sending tanks, which he eventually did, in a limited number. But the F16s are in a different category altogether.

They have the capacity to get deep into Russian airspace. Come on Zelensky, you think Russia will take that? Biden is hesitant about escalating this thing to a point of no return. But Zelensky is bullish. So are the youngish NATO members like Poland and the Baltic states. Hey chaps, go easy. You don't have nukes. Some think this eastern European over-excitement is stupid.

China remains the biggest question on this matter. She poses as a neutral arbiter, but deep down supports Putin. When Biden was waxing lyrical in Warsaw about defeating Russia, China’s top intelligence official landed in Moscow and met Putin. So far China has avoided being directly involved in the conflict.

But don't be foolish to imagine her silence means neutrality. China will not tolerate Russian military humiliation. That would leave her exposed to similar overreach by the West. Der Spiegel, a respected German magazine, reported in the same week that Russia and China were talking over the supply of deadly “suicide drones” for use in Ukraine. Aha.

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The Jubilee party is headed into the grave. Jeremiah Kioni is a genuine leader, but his party leader Uhuru Kenyatta is not. Current and former Jubilee MPs are shipping out en masse. The reason is simple: lack of leadership.

No consultations, no direction, no initiative, no drive. Why hang around a guy who’s clueless? He's just a flat tyre.

[email protected], @GitauWarigi