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If you are such an expert, you know about Suwałki Gap. Russia could invade Poland using Ukrainian stormtrooperzz in order to protect the 40 miles gap while simultaneously marching into Baltics thus connnecting enclave of Kaliningrad Oblast with motherland, achieving its strategic goals. Exactly the reasoning why they invaded Ukraine to protect Crimea.
And what would be the response from NATO? Article 5 is weak,
So yeah, in alternative universe Russia gets Ukraine, invades Poland and Baltics in 2025 in order to protect Russian minority from “nazis”, and makes it fait accompli - just like with Mariupol in Donetsk Oblast and Zaporizhzhia oblast and Kherson oblast, that Russia already officially annexed. Germans would send helmets to Poland and US agonizes if sending Himars can cause WW3. Was not NATO expansion in 2002 grave mistake provoking Russians anyways? Nobody has to do anything.
Per Wikipedia, Mariupol was conquered by Russia in May 2022, months after the Putins special operation had been begun.
For NATO to be effective, it does not have to be 100% committed to starting WW3 over a few square miles. Instead, following the method EY outlines in planecrash, it would be sufficient to escalate with a probability which is high enough to make the expected value of the defection of your opponent negative. Even a low but finite probability of responding in a way which will eventually lead to nuclear escalation will be enough to outweigh the gain of a bit of territory.
I think that NATO reactions to an invocation of Article 5 would be quite different from Western reactions to the invasion of Ukraine for game theory reasons.
If a slice of Poland gets invaded, and the rest of NATO is like 'well, they have already ceded so much territory to Russia in '45, surely they can spare another 50 square kilometers', then NATO as a defensive pact is dead. There can be some discussion if present day Russia is a credible threat in the same way that the USSR at the height of the cold war was, but if it was, then the options would be simple. Either your soldiers now fight Russia in your neighbors territory, or they fight them in a year in your own country, or they end up fighting someone else for Russia in two years. So the least-bad option would be to support your allies in a conventional war.
Of course, there have been precious few large-scale conflicts between nuclear powers, so the likelihood of such conflicts staying conventional for long is unknown. But both sides would have an interest to cause attrition to their enemies nuclear capabilities, and at some point someone might decide that faced with the choice between losing the retaliatory capabilities of a missile sub or silo or escalating to a nuclear conflict, it is not in their interest to defer nuclear escalation any longer.
What do you even know about the conflict? Are you not aware of siege of Mariupol, one of the most hard fought battles in the war?
Exactly. Why even risk invoking article 5? Don’t you think?
Originally, you used the term
with reference to Mariupol.
From my understanding, that term can be phrased as "done deal" and generally refers to a party accomplishing their objective before their opponent has time to react. A central case would be Crimea: from my understanding, it was occupied before Ukraine was even aware that it was under attack and could deploy military units. Rather than reinforcing their battling troops, they would have had to mount a completely new counterattack.
A city under siege is the opposite of a done deal. Attacking besiegers to break the siege goes all the way back to the dawn of warfare. If you besiege a NATO city for a few months, NATO will be under a lot more pressure to act than if you manage to take it overnight and cease hostilities.
I used the term fait accompli in relation to Russian invasion of Poland and Baltics. If Russians invaded Suwałki Gap, preventing NATO to supply Baltics, then they could march into Estonia/Latvia/Lithuania in hours or days. Once established there, it would be fait accompli. What would remain is for US/Polish/German/Spanish and other NATO troops to spill blood in house-to-house urban/trench fight to liberate their former NATO allies from the south. I can already see how enthusiastic the coalition would be in that case.
Also Mariupol was a done deal. It was surrounded in 2 days after invasion, the rest was mopping up operation without anybody able to do anything about it, with Russian tanks in suburbs of Kyiv.
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