Beware the inauspicious days before the Ides of March — the day the Russian presidential election begins.
While Washington focused on Super Tuesday results Wednesday, NATO and the world came dangerously close to spiraling into World War III.
How close? Only two NFL football fields.
Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis had just finished a “top-secret meeting” with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Black Sea port city of Odesa when, getting into their motorcade, a Russian ballistic missile exploded 200 meters away.
The two leaders had visited a residential building struck by a Russian drone on Saturday that killed 12 people, including five children.
Mitsotakis described the experience as “the most vivid reminder that there is a real war waging here.”
Despite the near miss, he said Greece will continue to stand at Ukraine’s side, adding that his presence “reflects the respect of the entire free world for your people.”
Had the Russian missile killed or severely wounded Mitsotakis and/or Zelensky, the war quickly could have begun to rage out of control.
Greece is a NATO member. Would the death of its prime minister cause Athens to invoke NATO Article 5?
It is not yet clear whether this was a Russian assassination attempt either on Mitsotakis or Zelensky.
But Russian President Vladimir Putin is on a roll — and aggressively seeking to press his non-battlefield advantages after Ukraine’s tactical withdrawal from Avdiivka.
Putin, ahead of the election starting March 15, is proving to be kinetically dangerous — domestically and globally.
He was almost certainly behind last month’s death of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny in a penal colony.
Putin is encouraging renewed nuclear threats by Russian officials and state-controlled media — and is known to be attempting to weaponize outer space, according to US intelligence officials.
Moscow knows its war in Ukraine is faltering: 420,000 Russian soldiers are now likely dead or wounded, and Putin, despite his outward appearances, is on edge — and mindful of controlling the narrative ahead of his fifth presidential election.
As it is, militarily speaking, it’s been a bad couple weeks for the Kremlin.
Fourteen Russian aircraft were shot down — including the second A-50 surveillance aircraft — and another naval ship from Putin’s once-prized fleet, the Sergei Kotov, took its place on the bottom of the Black Sea alongside the Moskva and 11 other Russian ships.
French President Emmanuel Macron, notably, made it even worse for Putin last week when on the steps of the Élysée Palace he suggested French and NATO troops could at some point be deployed inside Ukraine — and opposite Russian forces.
Putin clearly got the message.
The Kremlin swiftly responded, warning that war “between Russia and the U.S.-led NATO military alliance would be inevitable if European members of NATO sent troops to fight in Ukraine.”
The notion of Ukraine in NATO is already anathema to Putin.
The idea of NATO military forces potentially being in Ukraine — especially this close to the Russian presidential election — likely put the fear of God into Putin.
NATO troops in Ukraine, effectively, would be checkmate — and the end of his “special military operation.”
In that vein, it is not inconceivable that Putin ordered this assassination attempt on Mitsotakis and Zelensky as a warning to Macron, NATO and Kyiv.
If so, Putin took Macron seriously when he said, “We will do anything we can to prevent Russia from winning this war.”
Is this the length Russia will go to win the war in Ukraine?
Even if it means recklessly risking World War III by 200 meters?
Or was it just a miss not knowing beforehand the two leaders were nearby?
What is crystal clear: Putin is operating in a leadership vacuum of Washington’s making.
Capitol Hill’s ongoing failure to fund the war in Ukraine and the Biden administration’s persistent failure to ensure Zelensky and his generals have all the necessary military capabilities needed to win and expel the Russian invaders are allowing Putin to win in Washington and Brussels what he can’t win on the battlefields of Ukraine.
Global wars in Europe often begin in vacuums.
We witnessed that in Sarajevo in World War I when Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, was assassinated — and again in Poland when World War II began after the Nazis invaded.
Putin’s Odesa missile strike likely came within 200 meters of possibly igniting a third.
It is time for Washington to wake up and stop risking a third world war — and put an end to Putin’s machinations in Ukraine by empowering Kyiv to decisively defeat him.
Mark Toth writes on national security and foreign policy. Col. (Ret.) Jonathan Sweet served 30 years as a military intelligence officer.