Who’s Afraid of Putin’s Nuclear Blackmail?
The dictator’s threats work only if we allow them to.
LATE LAST MONTH, THE PEACENIK RIGHT erupted into its latest World War III panic, accusing the Biden administration of trying to escalate the war in Ukraine into nuclear Armageddon. David Sacks, a habitual peddler of nuclear alarmism, lamented that Joe Biden was taking the United States to a “disastrous place” by finally allowing Ukraine to strike military targets inside Russia with U.S.-supplied long-range missiles. Ex-Bernie-bro-turned-MAGA-stan Joe Rogan fumed, “How are you allowed to do that when you’re on the way out?”—adding a “Fuck you, man” to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Tucker Carlson declared that the administration’s move was “the most evil thing I have seen in my lifetime,” evidently eclipsing September 11th, genocide, the gassing of civilians, or the kidnapping of 20,000 or more children. He even speculated, Church Lady-style, that “Satan himself” could be running the White House.
What triggered this apocalyptic chorus was Russia’s use on November 21 of an intermediate-range ballistic missile—equipped with non-nuclear warheads but capable of carrying nuclear ones—against a military production facility in the Ukrainian city of Dnipro. In a televised address, Vladimir Putin stated that it was a response to Ukraine’s use of American-supplied ATACMS missiles against a military facility in Bryansk, a Russian border region. He warned that the missile fired by Russia, a new design called Oreshnik (“Hazel tree”), traveled too fast to be intercepted by missile-defense systems—and that Russia could also retaliate against any country providing long-range missiles to Ukraine. Two days earlier, the Kremlin autocrat had approved a revision to Russia’s official nuclear policy to permit a first strike in response to a conventional attack by any nation supported by a nuclear power.
Sacks, the venture capitalist who now fancies himself a foreign policy maven, explained that Putin’s display was a reminder to the West that he can blast us to smithereens. Well, yes; Putin might as well have had a WE CAN NUKE YOU sign in huge neon letters behind him. But should we be very afraid, or is this nothing more than a crude bluff?
Expatriate Russian journalist Michael Nacke makes a strong argument for the latter: It’s not as if we didn’t already know that Russia has nuclear warheads and long-range delivery systems. As for the revision to Russia’s nuclear doctrine, Nacke compellingly argues that it’s meaningless. First, the earlier policy already reserved the right to use nuclear weapons in response to a threat to the existence of the Russian state; the “revision” merely outlines a specific situation in which Russia could claim an existential threat. (As Nacke sarcastically notes, the Kremlin regime currently claims to see a lot of such threats, including LGBT activism.) Second, Nacke says, it’s absurd to believe that Putin’s actions are guided or bound by any formal policy: Formally, he was obliged to respect Ukraine’s sovereignty within its 1991 borders under a treaty Russia had signed. To this one might add that there’s no way of knowing what the real relationship may be between official Russian nuclear policy documents and actual Russian nuclear behavior since Russia has never used a nuclear weapon in warfare. In the decisive moment, if such a moment ever comes, it will be people, not papers, that make the decision to launch or not to launch.
Discussing the strike shortly after it happened, Nacke saw a possible significance in the fact that the Russian missile was fired at Dnipro, not at Kyiv, which has much stronger missile defense systems. Perhaps, he suggested, Putin wasn’t all that confident that the Oreshnik could really get past Western-supplied missile defenses: After all, Russia’s recent test of another new missile, the fearsome Sarmat, was a bust, as were the uses of the “hypersonic” Khinzhal missiles before it.
The Oreshnik demonstration may have been a dud as well: Satellite images showed no significant damage to the factory targeted. Senior Ukrainian officials have been quoted as saying that the missiles were carrying dummy warheads. Émigré military expert Yuri Fedorov has a different theory: based on the satellite photos and a video of the strike, he believes that the warhead may have detonated in flight due to overheating. According to Fedorov, Oreshnik is neither new—it’s likely a slightly altered variant of an earlier IRBM, RS-26 Rubezh—nor particularly terrifying, since Russia has been firing nuclear-capable missiles at Ukraine for years.
While Russian TV propagandists like Vladimir Solovyov went on their usual rampage of cheerleading for apocalypse, Russian pundits in exile mostly joined the Ukrainian media in poking fun at Putin’s nuclear swagger. “Oreshnik turned out to be a sham,” asserted former Ekho Moskvy radio host Ksenia Larina, who also noted that Putin looked visibly shaken and uneasy during his address. Nor was anyone particularly rattled when Putin brandished his supposed superweapon again on November 28 at the Astana, Kazakhstan summit meeting with the heads of several former Soviet republics, delving into the technical specifications of various Russian and Western missiles (with an awkward disclaimer that he was doing it at the request of other participants) and claiming that Oreshnik was capable of reducing the targeted area “to dust” even without a nuclear warhead. Some speculated that the real purpose of this lackluster performance was not only to intimidate but to divert attention from the collapse of the ruble: “The ruble is falling, but the missiles are flying,” quipped émigré journalist Maxim Katz.
Perhaps the most interesting theory was proposed by analyst Stanislav Belkovsky, who is confident that Putin will not cross the nuclear “red line” if only because his key quasi-partners, China and India—leading members of the BRICS group that gives Russia some respectable respite from international isolation—have strongly conveyed to him that they would find it unacceptable. Belkovsky believes that Putin’s nuclear escalation threats are primarily a gambit to force the United States to negotiate with him directly, thus treating him like an equal and according him the prestige and respect he craves.
WHILE THE LIKES OF SACKS and Carlson bewail Biden’s decision to partially untie Ukraine’s hands, there is another segment of conservative opinion that has consistently criticized the Biden administration for waffling on Ukraine. National security commentator Mark Toth and retired intelligence officer Jonathan Sweet, who jointly write a column for the New York Post, have long assailed what they see as Biden’s submission to “nuclear temper tantrums” from “Mad Vlad.” Like other hawkish critics, Toth and Sweet see confirmation for this charge in Bob Woodward’s recent book, War.
Woodward reports that in the fall of 2022, when the Ukrainian counteroffensive had the Russians on the run and intelligence assessments indicated that the Kremlin was considering a tactical nuclear strike, then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley spoke to his Russian counterpart Valery Gerasimov and asked under what conditions Russia would use a nuclear weapon. Besides a foreign strike with weapons of mass destruction, Gerasimov told him, those conditions were “an attack on Russia that threatens the stability of the regime” or “catastrophic battlefield loss.” As a result, despite taking various steps to deter Putin from any use of nukes, Biden and his team concluded that “too much success” by Ukrainian forces—i.e., a rout in which Russian forces were fully ejected from Ukraine—was too risky. Instead, the strategy was to “get Putin to accept modified failure with a battlefield stalemate” or to somehow get him to “defeat himself.”
Was this prudence, or weakness in the face of blackmail? The Biden administration’s hawkish detractors, domestic and foreign, are convinced that it was the latter—and some, such as Nacke, believe that Ukraine might have already won the war and recaptured all of its occupied territory if its defense hadn’t been hobbled by Western cowardice. Of course, that may be wishful thinking.
RIGHT NOW, BIDEN’S LAME-DUCK STATUS may have freed him to relax the constraints he put on Ukraine. The U.K. and France have followed Biden by greenlighting the use of their long-range missiles against targets inside Russia. (Germany, frustratingly, remains a holdout.) French foreign minister Jean-Noël Barrot reiterated this decision three days after Putin’s nuclear muscle-flexing and asserted that Western allies should not set “red lines” for Kyiv. Meanwhile, an undeterred Ukraine has already made a second ATACMS strike inside Russia, at a military airfield in the Kursk region. The use of these missiles may make it easier for Ukraine to retain the Russian territory it has captured in that region, currently under heavy onslaught.
Unlike his MAGA amen chorus, Trump himself has not criticized Biden’s decision to relax restrictions on Ukraine’s use of U.S. weapons. Belkovsky argues that Biden’s move actually strengthens Trump’s hand in potential dealmaking by giving him an extra bargaining chip.
While Trump has given Ukraine and its supporters precious few reasons to trust his pledge to protect Ukraine’s interests while pushing for peace negotiations, one thing is clear: If negotiations ever start, the better Ukraine’s position on the battlefield, the better its chances of not being fed to Putin’s imperial appetite.
Expanding Ukraine’s capacity to strike targets inside Russia is an improvement. Those who see such strikes as dangerous escalation should learn from foreign French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian, who, on the very day of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, responded to Putin’s nuclear bluff with a pointed reminder: “I think that Vladimir Putin must also understand that the Atlantic alliance is a nuclear alliance.”
As for the right-wing isolationists in the United States who bemoan Ukraine’s self-defense while ignoring the terror Russia has rained on Ukraine for nearly three years—as well as the recent escalatory move of importing thousands of soldiers from North Korea—their moral priorities speak for themselves.