At the Pentagon, top officials may indeed be getting worried that the risk of an unintended encounter between US and Russian military forces could turn into something much worse. Politico’s Bryan Bender reported yesterday that Pentagon officials are seeking back channel discussions with their Russian counterparts in order to find ways of heading off any inadvertent escalation between US and Russian forces. The relationship between Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Milley Milley and his Russian counterpart, Chief of the General Staff Gen. Valeriy Gerasimov is said to be key. Bender writes that this relationship “is at the center of a highly sensitive behind-the-scenes effort to prevent the biggest war in Europe in generations from spinning into a wider conflict. It’s a situation that became more urgent on Sunday, when Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered his nuclear forces on high alert after a series of what he called ‘aggressive statements’ by NATO powers.”
Pentagon officials say they hope their line of communication — which has been more frequent than that of Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and his counterpart, Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoygu — can help open up more regular links with Russian forces as the conflict ratchets up, Bender continues. “Now that Ukrainian airspace is in dispute and being contested and Ukrainian airspace runs right up alongside NATO airspace, we have conveyed to the Russians that we believe a conduit at the operational level is needed … so we can avoid miscalculation,” a senior Pentagon official told POLITICO. “And we have not received any response from them in terms of whether they agree, whether they are willing to set something up.”
The U.S.-Russian deconfliction line in Syria is the model, but whether such an arrangement can work in Europe is not clear, given the degree that the US and European countries are rushing to aid Ukraine.
