Putin yet to find replacement for nuclear threats – The Washington Post

Vladimir Putin. Stock photo: Getty Images

The Kremlin has started realising that the West is not succumbing to nuclear threats and Russian leader Vladimir Putin has been seeking new ways to enforce his red lines.

Source: The Washington Post

Details: At the beginning of September, Putin warned that if the West approved Ukraine’s strikes deep into Russia, it would mean Moscow was at war with NATO. Therefore, Russian propagandists began threatening the use of nuclear weapons again.

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However, within the Kremlin, there is a growing understanding that the repeated use of nuclear threats is starting to lose its effectiveness, as Moscow’s red lines are continuously being crossed. Analysts and officials close to Russian diplomats indicate that instead, Putin is seeking a more measured and limited response from the West if it allows Ukraine to use longer-range missiles to strike Russia.

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

A Russian academic with close ties to senior Russian diplomats concurred, calling the nuclear option “the least possible” scenario, “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.”

Tatiana Stanovaya, the founder of France-based political consultancy R-Politik, believes that Putin is exploring various options to curb Western support for Ukraine and to try to ensure that his red lines are respected. “There are options he doesn’t want to deploy, and there are options he is ready to review today,” she said, noting that he views nuclear weapons as the “worst option for everyone including for himself”.

Nuclear measures or a direct attack on NATO territory would only be considered if “Putin feels there is a threat to the existence of Russia in its current form, when he considers there is no other way out,” she stated. “For such a situation, the West should go a lot further than what it is discussing now.”

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