So much for Russia’s Nuclear Card

By Daniel Drezner, Professor of International Politics at The Fletcher School

Ever since the start of the full-blown variant of the Russo-Ukrainian War, there has been fretting and fussing over the risk of a nuclear conflagration. For some, this possibility has been top of mind. At a Flint, Michigan town hall, Donald Trump was asked what the greatest threat was to Detroit’s auto industry and his go-to answer was that nuclear war, “is the single biggest threat to the world, not only Michigan to the world, and you’re not going to care so much about making cars, if that stuff starts happening.” While I suppose Trump is technically correct, one could also answer, “an asteroid collision” or “the Earth’s core no longer spinning” and those answers would be about as helpful as Trump’s.

The hard-working staff here at Spoiler Alerts has been on record as increasingly skeptical of Putin’s nuclear saber-rattling. Back in May I wrote:

The thing is, when someone constantly brandishes a threat and then never acts on it, the threat starts to lose its potency. Putin and Russia have been warning about dire consequences from arming Ukraine for two-plus years now, and those consequences have yet to appear. Even the threats are starting to lose their effect, causing smaller media ripples each time Russia trots them out. Indeed, the common denominator in all the stories about Russia’s latest gambit, from Newsweek to the Times, is that any expert who is quoted downplays the significance of Putin’s nuclear gambits.

From February 2022 onward, pundits have fretted that the war in Ukraine would spill over into a great power war involving nuclear weapons. As crazy as it sounds, however, everyone’s behavior over the past two years has made it clear that this will not happen. Russia has no wish to fight NATO, and NATO does not want to engage in a direct war with Russia. Any time anything even remotely drifts in that direction, cooler heads have prevailed.

That brings us to this month, when deliberations have continued about whether Ukraine would be allowed to use Western-provided missiles to strike deep within Russian territory. The Kremlin has tried its darnedest to indicate that this time, they mean it about a red line. Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister suggested that Russia might change its nuclear doctrine, “because of what Russia sees as a Western-backed ‘escalation’ of the war with Ukraine.”

This was followed up by more even bellicose rhetoric from Putin. According to CNN, “Russian President Vladimir Putin has warned NATO alliance leaders that a move to lift restrictions on Ukraine’s use of longer-range Western missiles to strike deep inside his country would be considered an act of war. ‘This will mean that NATO countries – the United States and European countries – are at war with Russia. And if this is the case, then, bearing in mind the change in the essence of the conflict, we will make appropriate decisions in response to the threats that will be posed to us,’ Putin told reporters on Thursday.”

Sounds scary… except that this time around Western officials have largely brushed off Russian threats with little more than a shrug. CIA Director Bill Burns said in a public forum that the West should not be intimidated by Kremlin threats of nuclear escalation: “Putin’s a bully. He’s going to continue to sabre rattle from time to time. We cannot afford to be intimidated by that sabre rattling … we got to be mindful of it. The US has provided enormous support for Ukraine, and I’m sure the president will consider other ways in which we can support them.” A day later, Politico reported, “U.S. President Joe Biden and U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer brushed off Russian President Vladimir Putin’s threats Friday as they met to discuss Ukraine’s pleas to use British-supplied missiles against targets on Russian soil.”

Of course, not everyone was unperturbed. EU foreign policy honcho Josep Borell said, “it’s a dangerous moment because the Russian army has been pushed into a corner, and Putin’s reaction – threatening using nuclear arms – it’s very bad.” The Christian Science Monitor’s Fred Weir suggested that Russian analysts believed that this time was different: “The Kremlin sounds like it’s treating this challenge as the final straw.” And Trump’s advisors sounded panicky, because that is their go-to move in 2024.

Lawrence Freedman is much less perturbed, however, noting that Putin has found other ways to escalate: supporting other enemies of the West, as well as sabotage and subversion campaigns in Western countries (including the United States).

So is this time really different? The latest Washington Post story by Catherine Belton and Robyn Dixon, headlined “With nuclear option unlikely, Putin struggles to defend his red lines” suggests the answer is still a hard no:

Inside the Kremlin, there is a growing recognition that the repeated use of the nuclear threat is starting to lose its potency and Moscow’s red lines are constantly being crossed. Analysts and officials close to senior Russian diplomats said instead that Putin is casting around for a more nuanced and limited response to the West allowing Ukraine to use longer range missiles to strike Russia.

“There has been an overflow of nuclear threats,” said a Russian official speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject. “There is already immunity to such statements, and they don’t frighten anyone.”

A Russian academic with close ties to senior Russian diplomats agreed, calling the nuclear option “the least possible” of scenarios, “because it really would lead to dissatisfaction among Russia’s partners in the Global South and also because clearly, from a military point of view, it is not very effective.”

“All this discussion of the nuclear threshold overexaggerates the threat of such a type of escalation and underestimates the possibility of alternative options,” the academic added. “Since the West has a global military infrastructure … a lot of vulnerable points can be found.”

Putin is searching through a range of options to deter Western support for Ukraine and try to enforce his red lines, said Tatiana Stanovaya, the founder of France-based political consultancy R-Politik. “There are options he doesn’t want to deploy, and there are options he is ready to review today,” she said, and he sees nuclear weapons as the “worst option for everyone including for himself.”

This is good news. It turns out that Burns, Biden, Starmer et al are correct to discount Putin’s bluster. If Russian officials are acknowledging the emptiness of the nuclear threat, that’s a pretty strong piece of evidence that there will be no nuclear escalation, despite the recent unpleasantness for Putin within his borders.

But — and you knew there would be a “but” — this does not mean that Russia has no cards to play. Freedman is correct to point out that Russia will likely amp up its subversion and sabotage efforts and further aid other Western antagonists. With a U.S. presidential election on the horizon, Russian interference is a guarantee, even if its effectiveness is not.

The Russo-Ukrainian war will continue to have spillover effects. But the key takeaway from this month is that one of those spillover effects will not be a nuclear war. That seems like a good thing.

(This post is republished from Drezner’s World.)