Would Russia attack the west?

Unless the Russians just happen to decide that a successful Ukrainian counter-offensive or a Western military presence constitutes transgressions of some serendipitously generated red lines (although even then they’re far more likely to respond with a renewed attack on Ukraine’s civilians than with an attack on the West). What the Russian penchant for unpredictability ultimately means is, as I already hinted at above, that Russian notions of impassable red lines are so vague as to be arbitrary.

To make matters worse, a desperate Russian elite could decide that firing a missile at Warsaw or invading northeast Estonia might be a convenient way of acting tough at home and abroad, testing NATO’s resolve to follow through on Article 5, and thereby enhancing the Kremlin’s deteriorating legitimacy. The West need not cross any objectively recognizable red line for such a dire scenario to happen. Dictators are by nature unpredictable, and irrational sociopaths with unlimited power are especially unpredictable.

That being the case, Western policymakers have to build uncertainty and unpredictability into their assessments of Russian behavior. They have to realize that the Russians could just as easily declare that insulting Putin is a red line as that pushing their troops out of the Donbas is not.