Russia Expert: The West Is Deliberately Boiling The Frog Toward Nuclear War | Oleg Barabanov

Is Ukraine's battlefield momentum actually pushing Europe closer to war with Russia? I am joined by Dr. Oleg Barabanov, Program Director of the Valdai Discussion Club and Deputy Director of the Eurasian Studies Institute at MGIMO, to examine the true state of the war and why Ukraine's tactical successes may be increasing, not decreasing, the risk of wider escalation. Barabanov describes how intensifying Ukrainian drone strikes on Russian oil refineries have driven up gas prices and disrupted daily life, yet have consolidated Russian public opinion behind the Kremlin rather than eroding it, while Ukraine's own political crisis, triggered by the firing of Mykhailo Fedorov, exposes a parallel struggle between a new generation of drone-focused commanders and the old military establishment. We examine why the drone has rendered classical territorial warfare all but obsolete, replacing large-scale offensives with a grinding war of small infiltration units, and why this same dynamic is playing out in the US war on Iran, where a resurgent Iran has shown that middle powers can now inflict serious costs on great powers who can no longer win quickly or decisively. The West's strategy, Barabanov argues, has been to boil the frog slowly, but the danger is that the frog may yet jump out of the pot.