Ukraine’s attacks on Russia appear to be a gamble Washington has publicly sought to avoid—that Putin won’t go nuclear. But who’s really rolling the dice?

(Originally published Dec. 8 in “What in the World“) Back in May, U.S. President Joe Biden wrote an op-ed for The New York Times justifying his decision to send advanced missile launchers to Ukraine, overruling an earlier concern that doing so risked provoking Russian escalation.

Biden explained that sending the advanced weaponry to Ukraine was part of America’s duty to stand up to Russian aggression and even invoked that old Cold War chestnut, the domino theory, warning that failure to stop Russia in Ukraine would threaten democracy everywhere. Those missile launchers, the M142 High Mobility Artillery Rocket System, or Himars, proved pivotal in destroying Russian supply lines and enabling Ukrainian forces to take back parts of Kharkiv and Kherson.

At the time, this newsletter pointed out the risk that giving Ukraine Himars put Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the driver’s seat: he could use the Himars to launch attacks directly on Russian soil and thereby provoke an escalation of the war that would force the U.S. and its allies in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization into the conflict on his side. The same concern has prevented NATO and the U.S. from honoring Ukraine’s repeated pleas for fighter jets, advanced tanks and long-range attack drones.

Zelensky’s frustration with NATO’s refusal to give him more advanced weapons faster has been very public, raising the risk of a false-flag incident. Zelensky has still, for example, not publicly retracted his accusation that it was a Russian missile that caused a mid-November explosion in Poland and not, as NATO insists, a stray Ukrainian missile.

It turns out that Biden didn’t entirely trust Ukraine with those missile launchers, either. Though he gave the Himars to Ukraine, Biden wouldn’t give Zelensky the longer-range missiles that go with them, the MGM-140 Army Tactical Missile System, or Atacms. And just to keep Zelensky from somehow acquiring Atacms from some other country, the U.S. modified the Himars it sent Ukraine so they couldn’t fire Atacms, according to The Wall Street Journal.

What Biden may not have bargained on, however, was that Ukraine still had the capacity to develop long-range weapons on its own. But that’s what it appears to have done. Somehow, despite the ongoing invasion by Russia and a withering barrage of missile attacks, Ukraine has developed drones capable of making the journey deep into Russia to destroy targets there. Arms experts believe Ukraine may have retrofitted old Soviet surveillance drones, the Tupolev TU-141 Strizh, with explosive payloads. Ukraine hasn’t confirmed it officially, but it has used these drones to stage at least three attacks this week on military targets inside Russia.

In The Times’ analysis, Ukraine’s gamble is that Russia has already done everything it can to Ukraine short of a nuclear attack—and that it wouldn’t dare do that. But that’s a projection of how the West might justify Ukraine attacking Russia. To Kyiv, this is a battle for its very existence. Concerns about sparking global nuclear conflict are beyond its scope. Kyiv will do whatever it takes to win the war, even if that means gambling the fate of Europe and the U.S. to turn the odds in its favor. That’s what it means to fight an existential battle, which is how Russian President Vladimir Putin sees the war, too, according to U.S. intelligence. Victory must be achieved at any cost because defeat means certain annihilation.

We must hope, then, that Putin abides by Biden’s rules of engagement, the ones he laid out in his May op-ed. Biden wrote that the U.S. wasn’t “encouraging or enabling” Ukraine to attack beyond its borders. And the U.S. won’t intervene directly unless its own (or NATO’s) forces are attacked. Under those terms, Ukraine using homemade weapons to attack Russia aren’t justification for escalation by Russia against NATO.

And for his part, Putin appeared to be dialing back his more extreme rhetoric from early in the war, saying that, while the risk of nuclear conflict is rising, Russia wouldn’t use nuclear weapons except in response to a nuclear attack. “We have not gone mad,” he said.

The madness appears to have migrated. While most of the caution around U.S. involvement has centered on what Putin might do if cornered, we’re now led to believe that it’s Zelensky who’s become wildly unpredictable. What if, instead of facing an angry bear in Moscow, the U.S. finds itself with a mad dog in Kyiv?

In this scenario, Zelensky is gambling against escalation—and putting the West’s own existence at stake—all on his own, without consulting the same allies handing him billions of dollars’ worth of weapons, training his troops, feeding him intel on the whereabouts of Russian generals in the field and advising him on the strategy and misdirection that yielded Ukraine’s startling victories in Kharkiv.

This is the scenario that Washington is running with. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, reiterating almost verbatim the rules Biden laid out in May, said Tuesday that the U.S. had “neither encouraged nor enabled the Ukrainians to strike inside of Russia.”

So, Washington’s spin is that it has lost control of its client in Kyiv. Not a great PR position, particularly if you’re on the cusp of signing legislation that boosts U.S. defense spending by more than 10%, including $800 million in new military aid to Ukraine. Congress is now due to pass the $858 billion Fiscal 2023 National Defense Authorization Act this month, after Democrats agreed to scuttle a federal vaccine mandate for U.S. troops.

Another possibility, therefore, is that Ukraine’s drone attacks are a calculated, Pentagon-approved tactic aimed at forcing Russia to divert forces in Ukraine to its own defense and further sap Russian public support for the war—without giving Putin the rationale he needs to go nuclear.

Let’s hope it’s the latter. The mad dog scenario is too frightening.