Putin’s Nuclear Scare Tactics Will Fall Flat
Ukraine and the West are smart to take Russia’s nuclear doctrine at face value: No nukes will fly until and unless Russia faces an existential threat. So far, it hasn’t.
His nuclear red line is looking blurry.
Photographer: Vladimir Smirnov/AFP via Getty Images
As Ukraine’s armed forces routinely shell Russia’s southwestern regions and send armed drones as far as Moscow itself, the worry grows within the Russian policy elite that the very basis of their country’s great power pretensions — its ability to threaten the world with nuclear weapons — has been eroded to the point where adversaries feel they can simply ignore it.
“The fear of a nuclear escalation must be restored, otherwise humanity is doomed,” Sergei Karaganov, president emeritus of Russia’s Foreign and Defense Policy Council, wrote in the Profil weekly. Before the war in Ukraine started, Karaganov was considered one of the Kremlin’s intelligent voices; he’s not the first among once-respected Russian political thinkers to slide toward the hysterical edge since the invasion began. Back in September 2022, Fyodor Lukyanov, the editor of the journal Russia in Global Politics, and Dmitri Trenin, former director of the Carnegie Moscow Center, were already complaining that the West appeared to have lost its fear of Russia’s nuclear deterrent and discussing how to bring it back — that is, how to drive home to Americans that the US, too, could be the target of a Russian nuclear strike.