President Vladimir Putin has threatened to reach Russia’s nuclear arsenal at three points in the past two years: once at the start of the war against Ukraine two years ago, once as he was losing ground and again on Thursday. as it feels it is undermining Ukrainian defenses and American resolve.
In each case, the rattling of the sword has served the same basic purpose. Mr. Putin knows that his opponents — led by President Biden — fear an escalation of the conflict most of all. Even the fuss over nuclear power serves as a reminder to Mr. Putin’s many opponents of the dangers of pushing him too far.
But Mr Putin’s corresponding State of the Union address on Thursday also contained some distinct new elements. Not only did he show that he was doubling down on his “special military operation” in Ukraine. He also made it clear he had no intention of renegotiating the last major arms control treaty in force with the United States — one that expires in less than two years — unless the new agreement decides the fate of Ukraine, possibly by a large margin. part of it in Russia. hands.
Some would call it nuclear chess, others nuclear blackmail. Implicit in Mr Putin’s insistence that nuclear controls and the continued existence of the Ukrainian state must be decided together is the threat that the Russian leader would be happy to see all current limits on developing strategic weapons expire. This will free him to develop as many nuclear weapons as he wants.
And while Mr. Putin said he had no interest in continuing another arms race that helped bankrupt the Soviet Union, the implication was that the United States and Russia, already in a constant state of confrontation, would return to the worst Cold War rivalry.
“We are dealing with a state,” he said, referring to the United States, “whose ruling circles are taking openly hostile actions against us. So what?”
“Will they seriously discuss issues of strategic stability with us,” he added, using the term for nuclear control agreements, “while at the same time trying to inflict, as they say, a ‘strategic defeat’ on Russia on the battlefield?”
With these comments, Mr. Putin underlined one of the characteristic and most disturbing aspects of the war in Ukraine. Time and again, its senior military officials and generals have discussed the use of nuclear weapons as the logical next step if their conventional forces prove inadequate on the battlefield or if they need to deter a Western intervention.
This strategy is consistent with Russian military doctrine. And in the early days of the war in Ukraine, he clearly intimidated the Biden administration and NATO allies in Europe, who hesitated to provide long-range missiles, tanks and fighter jets to Ukraine for fear it would provoke a nuclear response or lead Russia . to strike across Ukraine’s borders into NATO territory.
A second fear about the possible use of nuclear weapons by Russia in October 2022 arose not only from Mr. Putin’s statements, but from US intelligence reports suggesting that battlefield nuclear weapons might be used against Ukrainian military bases . After a few tense weeks, this crisis subsided.
In the year and a half since then, Mr. Biden and his allies have become increasingly certain that, for all Mr. Putin’s bluster, he does not want to confront NATO and its forces. But whenever the Russian leader invokes his nuclear powers, it always sets off a wave of fear that, if pushed too far, he might actually seek to demonstrate his willingness to detonate a weapon, perhaps at a remote location, to convince his opponents Back off.
“In this environment, Putin may again engage in nuclear saber-rattling, and it would be foolish to dismiss the risks of escalation altogether,” wrote William J. Burns, the CIA director and former U.S. ambassador to Russia when Mr. Putin took office for the first time. recently in Foreign Affairs. “But it would be equally foolish to be needlessly terrorized by them.”
In his speech, Mr Putin portrayed Russia as the aggrieved state rather than the aggressor. “They themselves choose targets to hit our soil,” he said. “They started talking about the possibility of sending NATO military forces to Ukraine.”
That possibility was raised by French President Emmanuel Macron this week. While most of the NATO allies are talking about helping Ukraine defend itself, he said, “the defeat of Russia is necessary for the security and stability of Europe.” But the possibility of sending troops to Ukraine was immediately rejected by the United States, Germany and other nations. (Mr. Macron played right into Mr. Putin’s hands, some analysts say, exposing the differences between the allies.)
Mr Putin may have sensed, however, that this was an especially ripe time to test the depth of the West’s anxieties. The recent statement by former President Donald J. Trump’s assertion that Russia could do “whatever the hell it wants” to a NATO nation that did not contribute enough to the alliance’s collective defense and would not respond resonated deeply across Europe. So is Congress’s refusal, so far, to provide more weapons to Ukraine.
The Russian leader may also have been responding to speculation that the United States, worried that Ukraine is on a losing track, might provide longer-range missiles to Kiev or seize the long-frozen $300 billion in Russian assets now held in Western banks and to hand it over to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to buy more weapons.
Whatever sparked him, Mr. Putin’s message was clear: He sees victory in Ukraine as an existential struggle, central to his grand plan to restore the glory of the days when Peter the Great ruled at the height of the Russian Empire. And once a struggle is seen as a war of survival rather than a war of choice, the leap to discussing the use of nuclear weapons is small.
His bet is that the United States is heading in the other direction, becoming more isolationist, more unwilling to stand up to Russian threats, and certainly not as interested in confronting Russian nuclear threats as Presidents John F. Kennedy Jr. did. in 1962 or Ronald Reagan did it in the dying days of the Soviet Union.
That the current Republican leadership, which enthusiastically supplied arms to Ukraine during the first year and a half of the war, has now heeded Mr. Trump’s calls to cut off that flow may be the best news Putin has gotten in two years.
“Whenever the Russians go back to rattling nuclear sabers, it’s a sign of their recognition that they still don’t have the conventional military capability they thought they had,” Ernest J. Moniz, former energy secretary in the Obama administration and now the chief executive of of the Nuclear Threat Initiative, which works to reduce nuclear and biological threats, she said in an interview Thursday.
“But that means their nuclear posture is something they’re relying on more and more,” he said. And “that amplifies the risk.”
