President Joe Biden is vowing to ratchet up even more pressure on Vladimir Putin as the Russian leader stages a nationalistic pageant set to highlight the civilization-destroying potential of his nuclear arms in a new round of saber-rattling.
Russia's Victory Day celebration on Monday follows a stunning sequence of revelations about the deadly results of US intelligence sharing with Ukraine and after Biden called for a staggering $33 billion haul of arms and aid for Kyiv in another extraordinary step that widened US involvement in the war.
America's posture in providing a third country with that level of assistance to wound the US' nuclear superpower rival would have been unthinkable before the invasion, especially given Biden's desire to avoid a direct clash with Moscow.
The US role -- at the vanguard of a broad Western front against Putin, which is resulting in heavy losses for the Russian army -- is again raising questions about how far the Kremlin strongman can be pushed before he reacts.
The fact that there is now public knowledge about valuable intelligence that the West is offering Ukraine appears to increase the risk that Putin could be humiliated and might act in a way that could trigger a dangerous escalation.
This reality means Biden is under enormous pressure to calculate how far to go in Ukraine without crossing red lines that Putin has neither identified nor may not have even established in his own mind, to avoid a disastrous slide toward war.
This shadow game between Washington and Moscow is unfolding against a backdrop of vicious fighting in eastern and southern Ukraine. In the latest atrocity, about 60 people are feared dead after a Russian aircraft dropped a bomb on a school in Luhansk where civilians were sheltering on Saturday afternoon.
That carnage, typical of a ruthless pattern of attacks by Russian forces on civilians, underscored the sobering warning from CIA Director Bill Burns about the dangers of a new phase of the war.
"(Putin's) in a frame of mind in which he doesn't believe he can afford to lose," Burns said at a Financial Times event in Washington on Saturday. "I think he's convinced right now that doubling down still will enable him to make progress."
Burns also said that while the US is not seeing any evidence so far that Russia is mobilizing smaller yield, tactical nuclear weapons for use in Ukraine, the possibility that it might seek to do so cannot be dismissed.
"Given the kind of saber-rattling ... we've heard from the Russian leadership, we can't take lightly those possibilities," Burns said. "At a moment when ... the stakes are very high for Putin's Russia and those risks at this second phase of the conflict are serious and should not be underestimated."
This reality makes Monday's Victory Day parade, celebrating the victory over Nazism in World War II, especially symbolic and Western observers are waiting to analyze Putin's rhetoric for hints of how the war in Ukraine will unfold.
The celebration typically allows Putin to showcase examples of his nuclear-capable missile arsenal -- a spectacle that will have especially chilling implications this year.
The US balancing act is particularly acute because Putin has made clear for years that he believes the US is involved in a long-term effort to topple him and stifle Russia, so the rhetorical distinctions made in Washington about what the US is and isn't doing for Ukraine may be lost on the Russian leader isolated inside the Kremlin.
That's what makes news reports last week about intelligence sharing with Kyiv so significant. "It's not only javelins and stingers that are killing Russians and destroying equipment; intelligence is a weapon as well," former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper told CNN's Erin Burnett last week.
The stakes for the US and the world were underscored when the New York Times, CNN, and other outlets revealed that US intelligence contributed to successful attacks against senior Russian armed forces leaders and the country's naval flagship, the Moskva, which was sunk in a fearsome military and symbolic blow.
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When the news accounts emerged, senior US officials insisted that the US was acting in a legitimate and perfectly legal manner and that it was up to Ukrainians how to fit valuable battlefield intelligence into their strategy for the war. Source: CNN...
