Russia Climbs the Escalation Ladder With Hypersonic Zircon Missile Barrage as “Cup of Patience Overflowed”?

Key points

• In a war of attrition now exceeding four years, recent weeks have seen dangerous signs of escalation from Moscow.
• While Russia intensifies strikes on Ukrainian cities, Kyiv continues long-range drone operations, pushing the conflict into volatile new territory.” In just the past two weeks, the conflict has entered a far more volatile phase.
• The old guardrails have been trampled, the comforting illusion of predictability has shattered, and a war that once felt locked in stalemate has slipped back into dangerous, uncharted territory, where even a single misstep could ignite a wider regional conflagration, if not a nuclear Armageddon.
• Russia is steadily climbing the escalation ladder, and contrary to the comforting narrative that has taken hold in the West, the Kremlin still holds a deep reservoir of potent cards well below the nuclear threshold.
• The Chronology of Escalation On the night of May 13-14, a relative lull in the Ukraine War...