By Leonid Bershidsky / Bloomberg Opinion
As Ukraine’s armed forces routinely shell Russia’s southwestern regions and send armed drones as far as Moscow itself, the worry grows within the Russian policy elite that the very basis of their country’s great power pretensions — its ability to threaten the world with nuclear weapons — has been eroded to the point where adversaries feel they can simply ignore it.
“The fear of a nuclear escalation must be restored, otherwise humanity is doomed,” Sergei Karaganov, president emeritus of Russia’s Foreign and Defense Policy Council, wrote in the Profil weekly. Before the war in Ukraine started, Karaganov was considered one of the Kremlin’s intelligent voices; he’s not the first among once-respected Russian political thinkers to slide toward the hysterical edge since the invasion began. Back in September 2022, Fyodor Lukyanov, the editor of the journal Russia in Global Politics, and Dmitri Trenin, former director of the Carnegie Moscow Center, were already complaining that the West appeared to have lost its fear of Russia’s nuclear deterrent and discussing how to bring it back; that is, how to drive home to Americans that the U.S., too, could be the target of a Russian nuclear strike.
Karaganov’s op-ed goes even further. He argues that if the West ignores Russia’s increasingly dire warnings — such as, for example, a public call on all Russians and “people of goodwill” to leave certain areas in Western countries — Russia should actually “strike a group of targets in a number of countries”:
“It’s a horrible moral choice: We use God’s weapons and doom ourselves to heavy spiritual damage. But if we don’t do it, Russia could perish, and moreover, the entire human civilization likely will end.”
The game being played here is, of course, a time-tested good cop/bad cop one. Vladimir Putin, who used his state-of-the-nation address in 2018 to threaten the U.S. with Russia’s new hypersonic weapons, now has taken on the good-cop part. At the St. Petersburg Economic Forum least week, when the moderator pressed him for his views on using nuclear weapons, Putin tried to wave off the questions. “What is he trying to get me, or force me, to say? To scare the whole world? But why would we want to scare the world?”
The serious message of Putin’s remarks at the forum was that nuclear weapons were meant to counteract existential threats, and Russia isn’t facing one at the moment. He also revealed, however, that he’d deployed “the first nuclear charges” to Belarus, with more to come. Perhaps the mixed signals, too, are designed to revive Cold War-era fears.
Before the February 2022 invasion and as it began, the function of these fears in Russian military planning was to limit Western military aid to Ukraine so that Russia could maintain its battlefield advantages. Before President Donald Trump authorized the supply of Javelin antitank systems to Ukraine, the Kremlin signaled it would perceive such a move as escalatory; but then, after Russia invaded and the Javelins were used to keep Russian armor out of Kyiv and Ukraine’s northern regions, that supposed red line was quickly forgotten. The next one was crossed when the U.S. supplied HIMARS missile launchers to balance out Russia’s advantage in medium-range artillery; yet another one dissipated after NATO countries delivered tanks and other armored vehicles. The last major Russian weapon advantages that still remain are in long-range firepower — Russian missiles can reach any part of Ukraine — and in manned aircraft: Ka-52 helicopters, in particular, have proved a formidable obstacle to the current Ukrainian counteroffensive, while Russian warplanes have done severe damage with guided bombs and missiles.
The Russian response to previous weapon supply escalations has been consistently underwhelming: Russia simply adapted to losing one trump card after another. This has emboldened the United Kingdom to arm Ukraine with longer-range Storm Shadow missiles, which Russia struggles to shoot down, and a coalition of eight European countries plus the U.S. to start active preparations, including pilot training, for the handover of F-16 fighter aircraft.
And why not do so? For although Russia has regularly issued nuclear threats, it has never directly linked them with the supply of specific weapons systems or with any developments on the ground in Ukraine; or even on Russia’s internationally recognized territory, which Ukraine recently has felt free to attack.
Putin keeps playing the victim, complaining that the West deceived him in 2015 by mediating the unworkable Mink agreements. In a meeting with a delegation of peacemaking African leaders last week, he spun a new tale of duplicity, saying that Ukrainians had agreed in March 2022 to a peace deal that would have cemented Ukraine’s military neutrality; but went back on it at the bidding of their Western puppeteers as soon as Moscow pulled back its troops from Kyiv in a pure act of goodwill. Had these tales been true, however, they would only have reflected poorly on his judgment. They spell out grievances but lay down no specific red lines.
In the eyes of some Western analysts, that detracts from the credibility of Russian nuclear warnings. “My research suggests threats are most credible when repeated and when they are linked to specific conditions (such as on-the-ground behaviors in the Russo-Ukrainian war),” wrote Lauren Sukin of the London School of Economics and Political Science, whose analysis is in part based on her extensive study of North Korea’s nuclear saber rattling. “Conversely, one-off threats or threats about linked issues (such as NATO membership or broader policies) should be less critical.”
In other words, to be taken seriously, a red line has to be as specific as possible. There is, however, a downside to being specific for the Kremlin. If it said clearly that sending a certain weapons system to Ukraine would invite a nuclear response, the school of analytical thought in the West that maintains Russia would never actually use a nuke might prevail. Then Putin’s bluff would be called and he would need to make the “horrible moral choice” described in Karaganov’s op-ed; a situation he’s done his best to avoid by keeping his nuclear hints conveniently vague.
This is where the likes of Karaganov — or, for purely domestic consumption, the rabid commentators on state television who regularly threaten to turn Washington into a heap of nuclear ashes — come in handy. These polished, multilingual speakers and writers were always used to send messages to the West, and with normal, diplomatic lines of communication nearly severed, they are one of the few remaining channels for a harsher message than Putin’s.That message is still vague when it comes to red lines; it’s not clear what action by the West would force Russia to use “God’s weapons.” It does hint at a specific target, though. “Only if there’s a madman in the White House who hates his own country will America decide to strike in ‘defense’ of the Europeans, inviting a response and sacrificing, say, Boston for, say, Poznan,” Karaganov wrote, adding that while the world might be horrified by a limited Russian nuclear strike, the reaction would gradually settle down with the West put firmly in its place.
Karaganov’s reasoning is easy to turn around: Only a Russia-hating madman in the Kremlin would nuke a neighboring country, a NATO member to boot. But then that’s the hint behind the talk of God and heavy but acceptable “spiritual damage”: we might just be crazy enough to do this!
Unfortunately for Putin, he hasn’t acted crazy enough, at least not since the day he launched the invasion. Since that irrational move, he’s blathered and dawdled, feinted and bought his own propaganda; in short, he’s appeared more eager to shift the blame than to double down on the image of an evil, uncompromising predator or a fanatical mystic. If he’d managed to play either role convincingly, he may not have needed to lay down any clear red lines. As it is, the banality of evil has done him a bad turn. Fear isn’t a natural resource, and he hasn’t been convincingly scary. Using messengers such as Karaganov to spout messianic rhetoric will not erase this failure.
Both Ukraine and the West likely are right to take Russia’s nuclear doctrine at face value: No nukes will fly until Russia faces an existential threat, such as a massive invasion of its internationally recognized territory. No matter what the Kremlin and its various messengers may say, Ukraine’s efforts to liberate its own territory do not represent such a threat, not even to Putin.
Leonid Bershidsky, formerly Bloomberg Opinion’s Europe columnist, is a member of the Bloomberg News Automation Team. He recently published Russian translations of George Orwell’s “1984” and Franz Kafka’s “The Trial.”
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