Putin Nuking Ukraine

Vladimir will Nuke Ukraine rather than lose it to the West. While Russian President Vladimir Putin has not used nuclear weapons in Ukraine, Moscow has engaged in continuous nuclear rhetoric, lowered its formal nuclear threshold, and deployed advanced nuclear-capable delivery systems like the Oreshnik ballistic missile with non-nuclear payloads, actual use of a nuclear weapon has not occurred.Current Context of Russian Nuclear SignalingDoctrines and Threats: Putin has repeatedly revised Russia's nuclear doctrine to explicitly threaten retaliation against conventional attacks backed by Western allies.Advanced Missile Deployments: Russia has test-fired and deployed nuclear-capable intermediate-range systems (such as the Oreshnik) against Ukrainian infrastructure, using conventional warheads as psychological and strategic demonstrations.Joint Drills: Moscow and Belarus have conducted tactical and strategic nuclear readiness exercises to pressure Western nations over long-range military aid to Kyiv.International AssessmentNo Nuclear Detonation: Western intelligence and independent monitoring agencies confirm that no nuclear warheads have been deployed or detonated in the conflict.Deterrence Dynamic: Analysts note that Putin's repeated atomic warnings are designed to deter NATO escalation and restrict the supply of advanced weaponry to Ukraine, rather than signaling an imminent operational nuclear strike, which would carry catastrophic and unpredictable global consequences. On October 23rd, the Russian defense minister, Sergei Shoigu, made phone calls to the defense ministers of four NATO member countries to tell each of them that Ukraine was planning to detonate a “dirty bomb”—that is, a conventional weapon spiked with radioactive material—on its own territory. Three of the four recipients of this information—France, the United Kingdom, and the United States—responded that day with an unusual joint statement denouncing the claim. (Shoigu’s fourth interlocutor was Turkey.) Russian leaders and propagandists, who covered the phone calls in some detail, don’t necessarily think that anyone, anywhere, will believe that Ukraine would use a radioactive weapon against its own people just so it can blame Russia for the attack. Shoigu’s phone calls were preëmptive, another example of Russia creating information noise, sowing doubt, asserting the fundamental unknowability of the facts of war. On Thursday, Vladimir Putin said that he had personally directed Shoigu to make the calls, and this claim underscored their true meaning: Russia is preparing for a nuclear, or nuclearish, strike in Ukraine. This was not the first, second, or third time that Moscow had sent this message. Putin has been rattling the nuclear sabre since the start of the full-scale invasion in February, and, indeed, for many years before. In 2014, months after annexing Crimea and at the height of engineering a pro-Russian insurgency war in eastern Ukraine, Russia changed its military doctrine to open up the possibility of a nuclear first strike in response to a threat from NATO. In 2018, Putin first proffered his promise—since reprised, and replayed many times by Russian television—that, in a world-scale nuclear event, Russians will go to heaven while Americans “just croak.” The threat of a nuclear strike has become more apparent—more frequently repeated on Russian propaganda channels—since the Ukrainian counter-offensive began, at the end of the summer. The more the Kremlin has signalled its readiness to drop a nuclear bomb, the more the rest of the world has sought a reason to believe that it will not. Earlier this month, the U.K.’s defense secretary, Ben Wallace, reassured the audience at a Conservative Party conference that, although Putin’s actions could be “totally irrational,” he wouldn’t use nuclear weapons because he couldn’t risk losing the support of China and India—both of which, Wallace asserted, had put Putin on notice. President Biden has offered a different perspective: Putin, he said, is a “rational actor who has miscalculated significantly” in launching his offensive in Ukraine, and this was the reason he wouldn’t use nuclear arms. (On another occasion, Biden said that a Russian nuclear strike would unleash Armageddon.) Jake Sullivan, the U.S. national-security adviser, has consistently said that the White House takes Putin’s threats seriously and would respond decisively in the case of a nuclear attack. Still, in recent weeks, as Moscow has ramped up its warnings, it has become conventional wisdom, or perhaps just good form, to say that Putin isn’t really going to use nukes. “Russian President Vladimir Putin will probably not drop an atomic bomb on Ukraine,” a September Washington Post editorial began, axiomatically. Bloomberg’s European-affairs columnist Andreas Kluth started a recent column by instructing the reader to “put aside, if you can, the growing anxiety about Russian President Vladimir Putin going nuclear in his barbaric war in Ukraine” because, Kluth asserted, the risk “remains small.” Such is the feedback loop of propaganda, ambition, and fear that shapes Putin’s perceptions of the world. When Russia invaded Ukraine, Bondarev writes, many of his colleagues “took pride in our increasingly bellicose behavior.” When questioned, “they gestured at our nuclear force.” This was during the very early days of the full-scale war, when Russians and much of the world believed that Ukraine would quickly lose. As the Russian offensive faltered, the deployment of the nuclear threat went from triumphant to menacing. “One official, a respected expert on ballistic missiles, told me that Russia needed to ‘send a nuclear warhead to a suburb of Washington,’ ” Bondarev writes. “He added, ‘Americans will shit their pants and rush to beg us for peace.’ He appeared to be partially joking. But Russians tend to think that Americans are too pampered to risk their lives for anything, so when I pointed out that a nuclear attack would invite catastrophic retaliation, he scoffed: ‘No, it wouldn’t.’ ” Although it may be evident to a non-Russian military strategist that the use of a nuclear weapon would be strategically disastrous for Russia, Putin sees his mission in grander and less pragmatic terms. He believes that, on the one hand, he is facing down an existential threat to Russia and, on the other, that Western nations don’t have the strength of their convictions to retaliate if it comes to nukes. Any small sign of a crack in the Western consensus—be it French President Emmanuel Macron pressuring Ukraine to enter peace negotiations, or the House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy criticizing what he sees as unconditional aid to Ukraine—bolsters Putin’s certainty. An army of yes-men and the propaganda machine amplify both the threat Russia ostensibly faces and the support it supposedly enjoys. Last week, Putin hosted his annual Valdai policy conference, an invitation-only junket that has traditionally served as a way for him to broadcast his message to the world. In the past, the audience has consisted largely of Western journalists and Russia scholars. But the crowd at this year’s event was different. The topic was “A Post-Hegemonic World: Justice and Security for All.” Putin delivered a nearly hour-long talk on the need to liberate the non-Western world from the choke hold of “cancel culture” and “the ten different genders” that the West inflicts on countries in place of “traditional values.” For a couple of hours afterward, he fielded questions from representatives of Indonesia, Pakistan, India, Brazil, former Soviet republics in Central Asia and the Caucasus, and others; most speakers began by expressing respect bordering on adulation. “Many countries are tired of living under the rule of external powers,” Putin remarked at one point. “The more they see us pushing back against that pressure, the more they support us. That support will only grow.” Putin’s world view—in which he, a once-lowly K.G.B. bureaucrat, wields a mighty sword that will save the world from decadence and decay—is the product of his specific background and historical moment, but it also belongs to a recognizable type of thought. Charles Strozier, who founded the Center on Terrorism at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice at the City University of New York, has written extensively on what he calls the “fundamentalist mindset,” the kind of thinking that can fuel genocidal violence. And he has recently written about the evidence that suggests Putin, like Adolf Hitler and Osama bin Laden, has it. Strozier told me, “The thing that psychologically infuses the leadership style of someone like Putin, or Hitler, is the certainty that comes with paranoia.” That Putin is paranoid is an observable fact: he is obsessed with the idea that Russia is surrounded by enemies; he is terrified of all protest and dissent, even though he has long since disabled any levers by which either could influence his regime; his fear of the coronavirus and, possibly, assassination, has driven him into near-total isolation and compels him to hold in-person conversations across giant tables. “The certainty that comes with paranoia is a strength of their leadership style, but, because they are inflexible, they make huge mistakes,” Strozier said. The fundamentalist mind-set is apocalyptic and millenarian. Hitler had the idea of the “thousand-year Reich,” which positioned him as a successor to Roman and German emperors. Putin’s excursions into history have been similarly grandiose: he views himself as the last of a lineage of Russian emperors, and he explicitly dismisses historical facts—such as the existence of the Ukrainian state—that interfere with this narrative. Snyder, the Yale historian, has written extensively about the apparent influence on Putin of Ivan Ilyin, a twentieth-century Russian émigré philosopher who believed that the world, corrupted by Western-style liberalism and individualism, was ripe for radical renewal at the turn of the new millennium. I think that Snyder may overestimate the primacy of Ilyin’s teachings in Putin’s thinking: Putin uses ideas instrumentally, picking up and wielding them when he needs to say something that affirms his intuition. He has, similarly, used the ideas of the contemporary philosopher Alexander Dugin, another mystical thinker who believes that Russia’s mission is to restore traditional order to a world endangered by chaos coming from the West. The specific words and concepts are less important than Putin’s sense of his own vast historic mission. In a 1990 book called “The Genocidal Mentality,” Lifton, the psychohistorian, discussed the term “nuclearism,” which he viewed as an ideology akin to Nazism. The politics of deterrence, he argued—the entire school of thought that saw the survival of the world as contingent on a balance between powers capable of annihilating it—activated “a mind-set that includes individual and collective willingness to produce, deploy, and, according to certain standards of necessity, use weapons known to destroy entire human populations.” Both nuclearism and Nazism offered themselves as cures for historical disasters: Nazism for the humiliation Germany supposedly suffered in the aftermath of the First World War and nuclearism for the catastrophe wrought by the U.S. bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Both Nazism and nuclearism positioned themselves as preventive, as hedges against a greater threat—to the Aryan race by Jews and others, or to all of human life by nuclear holocaust. Both ideologies are peculiarly modern in that they “include near worship of science and technology.” And both feature “vast societal involvement in a genocidal project, creating dangerous forms of bureaucratic momentum that can carry one across the threshold into genocide.” The threat against which Russia must wield its nuclear shield is the encroachment of the West, framed variously as the expansion of NATO, an assault on traditional values, the advancement of “gender ideology,” and a spreading decadence. All of it adds up to an existential threat to Russia, which in Putin’s view is a besieged island of heterosexuality, whiteness, and truth. Strozier has written that the fundamentalist mind-set involves an overarching mission that justifies all means. “The salvational notion is always present in genocide,” he told me, citing Hitler’s belief that inferior forms of life had to be exterminated to enable the thousand-year Reich. “Large-scale violence, genocide is embarked upon for a moral purpose.” Putin and his propaganda machine have also framed the war in Ukraine as a struggle that flows directly out of the battles of the Second World War. Over the years, Putin has reminded Russians that they sacrificed the most in the fight against the Nazis—at least twenty six and a half million killed, according to post-Soviet historians. (A disproportionate number of those lost lives were Ukrainian, but Russia lays claim to their legacy, too.) He has also asserted that Russia was “alone” in fighting the Nazi menace and therefore Russia has the right to determine who is a Nazi now. But Russia is not just cosplaying the Second World War—the country is still prosecuting it, fighting to regain the superpower status once achieved by beating back Nazi Germany. This narrative bolsters Putin’s belief that he has the moral right to use nuclear arms. The Americans did it, so the Russians can, too. Lifton won the National Book Award in 1969 for a book about survivors of the bombing of Hiroshima, in which he described the predicament of the city’s residents as a “lifelong immersion in death.” The phrase can just as well be used to describe the experience of Russians who grew up in the shadow of the Second World War. Putin was born in the first postwar decade, and raised in Leningrad, a city that lost a still uncounted number of civilians—the official toll was six hundred and thirty-two thousand, but estimates range upward of a million—during a nearly nine-hundred-day siege. The siege of Leningrad was, by contemporary standards, a war crime, one that Russian troops have repeated this year in Mariupol and elsewhere in Ukraine. The devastation of the city and the degradation of its residents were total: people died of hunger, but not before they had eaten, pawned, or used as fuel whatever remained of their lives. After the war, Soviet propaganda glossed over the ugly brutality of the siege while it valorized its victims and survivors. Polina Barskova, a Russian poet, literary scholar, and historian at the University of California, Berkeley, told me, “What distinguished books about the siege that could be published from those that couldn’t was that the former claimed the sacrifice had a purpose. It was Victory with a capital ‘V’ over Enemy with a capital ‘E’ and Evil with a capital ‘E.’ It’s the kind of goal for which you can sacrifice any number of human lives.” For Leningrad natives, this myth is a birthright. For Putin, it is further proof that he has the moral right to kill, or condemn, entire human populations. Putin’s older brother died, as a toddler, during the siege. His parents survived—barely, miraculously. “No one could survive by living solely off the ration cards issued by the government,” Barskova, whose book of short stories and essays about the siege, “Living Pictures,” was recently published in an English translation, said. “That is just a fact. Every survivor was a miracle, and most acts of surviving were transgressive, criminal.” Survivors had access to state power—nomenklatura rations—or committed crimes to pull through, or both. Putin is now the head of the criminal state that is Russia. He believes that he is exceptional and will survive the nuclear disaster he unleashes. It also helps that he has built a series of bunkers, underground palaces where, he imagines, he can survive the nuclear holocaust in luxury. In the end, every “rational” case for why Putin won’t use nuclear weapons in Ukraine falls short. He is not afraid of losing support from his current allies, because he misapprehends Russia’s position in the world; he sees Russia as politically, economically, and militarily stronger than it is. Chinese and Indian leaders may express alarm at the use of extreme measures such as nuclear weapons, but to Putin this points to their lack of resolve—their weakness, not the Kremlin’s. And, if need be, he is prepared to make outlandish denials, no matter how implausible. Russian propagandists have argued that the Malaysian airliner shot down over eastern Ukraine in 2015 was packed with corpses by bad actors trying to frame Russia and that the scenes of war crimes in Bucha were “staged.” Indeed, Shoigu’s Sunday phone calls opened the possibility of Russia deflecting blame for a nuclear strike by claiming that it was a Ukrainian false-flag operation. The arguments that Putin won’t use nuclear weapons because doing so would endanger Russians, including himself, are blind to the fact that Putin believes he has the right, possibly the moral obligation, to sacrifice hundreds of thousands or millions of people. The argument that a nuclear strike wouldn’t help Putin achieve his strategic goals mistakes Russia’s strategic goals as anything but inflicting terror on Ukrainians. The losses the Russian military is suffering now can only motivate Putin to create more terror, against more people. The one credible argument remaining is that Putin may fear repercussions. He is not afraid of nuclear retaliation—because Ukraine doesn’t have its own nuclear weapons and NATO is unlikely to mount a nuclear response against the use of a nuclear weapon inside Ukraine. (And, if NATO did, Putin believes that he would have a totally mobilized, albeit diminished, nation.) What he may fear, however, is an extreme response from NATO using conventional weapons—a series of strikes, for example, that would devastate Russia’s Black Sea Fleet and destroy all its remaining military capability in Ukraine. This would be a blow so humiliating that nothing but a second, more powerful nuclear strike could avenge it. Is that a prospect that Putin is unwilling to contemplate? Possibly not, but it is as close as the West can get to deterrence these days. PG KO