Ukraine's Western Partners Are Standing Up to Putin's Nuclear Bluff

As Russian forces struggle to maintain their hold on occupied territory in Ukraine's south and east, the Kremlin has turned to nuclear blackmail in an apparent attempt to stall Western support for Kyiv.

The tactic does not appear to be working.

Russia's first veiled threat of nuclear escalation came on September 20, when, in the run-up to a series of illegitimate "referendums" aimed at incorporating the partially occupied Ukrainian regions of Kherson, Zaporizhia, Donetsk, and Luhansk into the Russian Federation, Vladimir Putin warned: "If the territorial integrity of our country is threatened, we will certainly use all means at our disposal to protect Russia and our people. This is not a bluff."

However, even after a Red Square celebration on October 1 welcomed these new provinces under Moscow's purported nuclear umbrella, Ukraine has continued to strike Russian targets in all four regions, and military analysts expect Ukraine to take back control of the provincial capital of Kherson by the end of the calendar year.

Russia has shown no indication that it is preparing any sort of nuclear response.

The second threat appeared on October 23, when Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu called his counterparts in the UK and France with the warning that Ukraine was planning to stage a false flag operation by detonating a radiologically contaminated "dirty bomb" on its own territory. Former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine John Herbst, currently the director of the Atlantic Council, explained how Russia attempts to use such threats as a tool of statecraft.

"With stories like the dirty bomb, there are two intended audiences, and both of them are in the West," Herbst told Newsweek.

"One audience is legitimate policy makers and other influential figures, who know from experience that Russia, and the Soviet Union before it, often accuses its opponents of doing the things that Moscow itself either does or is planning to do," he said. "Rhetoric like this takes a low probability threat and hypes it sufficiently that it cannot simply be ignored."

"The second audience is less informed members of the Western community, who in some sad cases actually believe this stuff," Herbst explained. "Just as there were people who bought the Russian allegations about biological warfare laboratories in Ukraine and neo-Nazis in Kyiv, there are those who are inclined to believe these fantastical stories about the alleged Ukrainian intent to use dirty bombs and who then go out and peddle this nonsense in democratic societies."

In Herbst's view, the proper Western policy response requires making it clear to the Kremlin that Russian cannot blackmail its way to victory, whether in Ukraine or beyond.

"Putin's game is really to intimidate us into stopping our support for Ukraine, and so we should respond by sending Ukraine all the weapons they need, along with the economic support to sustain themselves for as long as Russia continues to occupy Ukrainian territory," he said.

"I cannot absolutely guarantee that Putin is bluffing, but even in the low probability event that he is serious, our backing down does not address the actual problem," Herbst added. "If Putin claims a victory in Ukraine based on his use of nuclear blackmail, then we will likely be facing another situation involving Russian nuclear blackmail in the not too distant future."

Given the immense military and economic resources at NATO's disposal, along with the diplomatic resolve that Western countries have shown by uniting against Russian aggression since February 24, there is no good reason to expect that the Russian use of a nuclear weapon would improve the Kremlin's geopolitical position.

However, any Russian decision regarding escalation will be made based on the Putin inner circle's understanding of the situation, not on the totality of the facts as they exist in the real world. Given the frequency with which high-level Russian officials publicly state positions that bear little resemblance to reality, it can be difficult for Western policy makers to assess how serious the threat of escalation actually is.

"The top Russian leadership, including the president himself, consistently expresses a worldview which includes quite a bit of conspiratorial thinking," Pavel Podvig, director of the Russian Nuclear Forces Project, told Newsweek. "However, that distorted view of reality still partly reflects the situation in the real world, at least to some extent, and so there are actions that the West can take which will influence Russian behavior."

Podvig suggested that the most effective means of diminishing the Russian nuclear threat would be to eschew the rhetoric of mutually assured destruction in favor of a loud, clear, consistent, physically nonthreatening appeal to morality.

"A public commitment coming from the West not to use nuclear weapons would have a positive effect, because it promotes an environment in the world community in which nuclear weapons' use remains wholly unacceptable," he explained. "It denies Putin and the Kremlin the opportunity to make a convincing argument that Russia is under threat, or that it needs to respond with nuclear weapons in self defense."

"Western statements that the weapons it is supplying to Ukraine will not be used against the legally recognized territory of the Russian Federation also help in this regard," he added.

Such messaging could be important not only for uniting the world against Russia should it choose to go nuclear, but also for pressuring influential figures within the Russian chain of command itself.

"Even with all of the personal power that Putin has, I don't think he could just order a general to bomb Kyiv," Podvig said. "I'm not predicting that in such a scenario the general staff would turn insubordinate, but I don't know."

"There is at least the chance that, if people in the chain of command believe that they are being ordered to take highly consequential actions without having a clear justification for doing so, they could refuse to follow through," he added.

While Putin and those around him have made catastrophic miscalculations in the past, they have not made the wrong decision at absolutely every turn. For whatever reason, Russia's continuing reluctance to use weapons of mass destruction in Ukraine suggests that the Kremlin leadership believes that an unconventional escalation is not worth the risk, at least at the present moment.

"I agree that, as a result of Putin's orders, Russia is worse off now than it was on February 23, and also worse off now than it was in 2013, before Crimea," Podvig said. "However, just because the Russian leadership has made the wrong decision in some cases does not mean that it will make the wrong decision in all cases, even if it is threatening to do so."

"Despite hints at the presidential level that the territories of Kherson, Zaporizhia, Donetsk, and Luhansk regions would be defended by all means available to the Russian military," he explained, "we've seen that continuing Ukrainian strikes and counter offensive operations in these areas have not resulted in the use of nuclear weapons."

Still, given the constantly shifting rhetoric and occasional self-destructive behavior of Russian officials, the risk of Russia using nuclear weapons will remain present for at least as long as Russian soldiers continue to occupy Ukrainian territory.

"We're likely a long way from this, but if Russia finds itself with an army on the edge of collapse, we don't know what happens next," Podvig said. "In that scenario, I don't believe that Russian nuclear use would produce any positive military effect for the Kremlin, and I would like to think that they don't believe so either."

"But as with a lot of these hypothetical situations," he added, "we simply won't know the answers for certain until we arrive at them."