You have not witnessed this tension in 70 years... Are US-Russian relations on the threshold of a break?

Washington

- At a time when the mutual escalation between Moscow and Washington has not stopped since the start of the Russian attack on Ukraine one month ago, the relationship between the two countries has reached a complex stage.

While Washington vows to do everything in its power to defeat Russia in Ukraine, Moscow asserts that if the United States wants to preserve relations between the two countries, it must stop escalation, stop supplying weapons to Ukraine, and not demonize Russia.

In an interview with Al Jazeera Net, Alexandra Fakro, professor of international relations and executive director of the Davis Center for Russian Studies at Harvard University, indicated that there is no interest for the two parties to reach the point of severing diplomatic relations between them.

US President Joe Biden has repeated - in more than one statement - that his country and its allies will work with all force to inflict a "strategic defeat" on Russia.

Relationships on the verge of collapse

The Russian Foreign Ministry stressed that the future of relations with the United States depends on Washington and its policy toward Moscow, noting that these relations are on the threshold of a break.

Russia's ambassador to Washington, Anatoly Antonov, tweeted, "America's giving itself the right to judge alleged war crimes in Ukraine is disgusting for a country that has taken hundreds of thousands of lives and destroyed many countries around the world."

Yesterday, Wednesday, US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken announced that his country believed that "Russia committed war crimes in Ukraine."

In a statement, Blinken referred to the "repeated brutality in the Ukrainian city of Mariupol, which amounts to crimes against humanity."

"Our assessment is based on a careful review of available information from public and intelligence sources," he said, and that the International Criminal Court would look into the matter.

During the past days, the two sides exchanged the expulsion of increasing numbers of diplomats, especially after Biden declared that Russian President Vladimir Putin was a "war criminal."

"I think the Russians have escalated diplomatically, because they do not have other ways to respond to Biden's description of Putin as a war criminal," Professor Fakero told Al Jazeera Net.

Economically, the two countries do not have huge relations like the one between Washington and Beijing.

The volume of trade exchange between the two parties in 2021 amounted to approximately $29.7 billion, according to US Department of Commerce data, of which $6.3 billion were US exports, compared to $23 billion in imports from Russia.

The source of energy from oil represents the largest proportion of American imports, and following the Russian attack, the Biden administration decided to ban the import of oil from it.

A demonstration in Berlin rejecting the war before it broke out last February (Getty Images)

sensitive military relations

US reports indicate that since the start of the Russian war on Ukraine, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley have tried to phone their counterparts, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and General Valery Gerasimov, but the Russians "refused even to respond to them," according to Pentagon spokesman John Kirby, on Wednesday.

Austin and Millie's attempts come at a time when the forces of the two countries are close to each other geographically;

Russian forces have reached areas inside Ukraine near the borders of NATO-member Poland and Romania, at a time when Washington and its allies transfer many weapons to the Ukrainian army through secret corridors from Romania and Poland for use in fighting the Russians.

The United States and its European allies are also conducting surveillance and air patrols over the Baltic Sea, adjacent to the Russian border.

For these reasons, a direct line of communication was opened between the Russian and American armies to notify each other of a number of possible air operations, especially with the two armies located at a fairly close distance, in order to avoid the occurrence of any unintended mistakes that lead to an escalation that the two parties do not want.

US military officials say the Russian offensive, after a month of fighting, has reached a stalemate, raising concerns about President Putin's next steps.

'real threat'

Among the topics that Biden discussed with NATO leaders in a closed session was how to respond if the Russian president decided to use nuclear or chemical weapons or launch a massive cyber attack.

In response to a question as he left the White House on Wednesday about the threat of chemical warfare, Biden said he felt it was a "real threat."

It is likely that NATO will reinforce its forces along its eastern flank, and deploy 4 new battle groups in Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania and Slovakia, numbering 40,000 soldiers.

At the same time, US military sources indicated Washington's readiness to immediately send 100,000 US troops to secure the borders of NATO.

Energy prices rose in Europe after the West and the United States imposed severe economic sanctions on Russia (Getty Images)

After the US escalation

Over 70 years of competition between the United States and the Soviet Union and during the Cold War era, the two powers came close to sliding into a nuclear war that could have been avoided during the Cuban Missile Crisis of the 1960s, yet even with this dangerous degree of tension Washington did not impose sanctions on Soviet leaders and did not Their financial assets are frozen in Western institutions.

From here, Russian leaders do not understand the severity of US sanctions and the pledge that Russia must be defeated in Ukraine, and Washington's pledge to force Russia to pay the price for this military step.

So far, US and Western sanctions have not stopped Russia's war in Ukraine, and it is unclear whether new steps expected during President Joe Biden's visit to Brussels will change that.

Biden hopes to succeed by pushing European partners to impose new sanctions on Russia that cut off its oil and gas profits, or to announce massive new military or financial aid to Ukraine.

Professor Fakro, an expert on Russia, did not hesitate to say, "To be frank, relations have already reached a disastrously low point."

According to the expert, there are still a few areas in which cooperation continues;

There is an American astronaut who is scheduled to return from the International Space Station with a Russian capsule later this March, and a telephone hotline was established to avoid any clash between the European American Command with NATO and the Russian Ministry of Defense at the beginning of this March, and testing This line is daily, to which the other side replies, "However, economic and political relations have been almost completely severed."

The embassies of the two countries still carry out their traditional functions in Moscow and Washington, albeit at lower levels and with smaller numbers of diplomats.

Nevertheless, the expert Fackro estimates that there will not be a complete severing of relations between the two countries, because this is not in the interest of either side.