Russian nuclear intent is communicated through two very distinct means: publicly stated doctrine; and rhetoric, propaganda and threats. Most of the alarmed commentary in the West on the likelihood of nuclear use by Russia has been driven more by rhetoric – threats routinely made by Russian leadership figures and amplified by propagandists, most notably on state television – than by doctrine (what the Russian armed forces themselves think nuclear weapons can be used for, or indeed be useful for). This has had the effect of distorting discussion in the public domain of the problem of possible nuclear use by Russia, including by political leaders in the West.
Even experienced commentators on nuclear issues have at times been swayed by the rhetoric, coming to believe that each new threat may mean an actual change in Russian nuclear policy. In one typical example, in a televised address on 21 September 2022, President Vladimir Putin claimed senior NATO officials had stated nuclear weapons could be used against Russia, and continued:
Putin’s words were widely interpreted, among Western audiences, as a new and escalatory direct threat of nuclear use, triggering a wave of alarmed commentary. But a more sober assessment indicated that what the Russian president was saying was neither escalatory nor new. In fact, rather than being a new challenge, the specific scenario he was referring to had been anticipated by analysts some months earlier, in May 2022. Similarly, in a television interview in late March 2023, Putin mentioned implementation dates for long-established plans for building infrastructure to host Russian tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus. Western media immediately seized on this as a new and dangerous escalation in response to recently announced UK plans (noted later in this paper) to supply Ukraine with anti-tank rounds containing depleted uranium cores.
The risk of over-reaction in coverage of Russian nuclear threats appears particularly pronounced if commentators are relatively new to the Russian problem set, and so may not fully account for the essential context that threatening language around nuclear use is an inescapable background noise from Russia that long predates its war on Ukraine. Similar threats were heard, for example, when Boris Yeltsin was president, during a period when Russia’s relations with the US were broadly considered to be much better.
In reality, the ‘nuclear card’ is routinely in play throughout Russian concepts of crisis and war management, and of international relations more broadly. As Dima Adamsky, a leading expert on Russian strategic thinking, put it in 2015, reference to nuclear weapons forms an integral part of a toolkit that is drawn on ‘to manipulate the adversary’s perception, to maneuver its decision-making process, and to influence its strategic behavior’ without actually going to war. However, this understanding has been largely overlooked in the Western response to intimidation by Putin, along with broader principles of deterrence whereby ‘[a] particularly unscrupulous actor may intend to create a risk of nuclear escalation, or a perception of such a risk, and use it to its advantage, but the realization of the risk is not intended.’
The risk of over-reaction in coverage of Russian nuclear threats appears particularly pronounced if commentators are relatively new to the Russian problem set.
In the six months following Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, these factors combined to cause an unprecedentedly intense barrage of threatening nuclear language involving all elements of Russia’s information warfare apparatus – from President Putin, down through public diplomacy and state media commentators and propagandists, to agents of influence abroad and Russia’s ‘troll armies’ on social media. It was in this context that the first version of this paper, considering the likelihood that these nuclear threats might become reality, was drawn up for US European Command’s Russia Strategic Initiative (with whose kind permission it has now been updated for public release).
The situation has evolved substantially between mid-2022 and the completion of the current version of the paper, in March 2023. As detailed in the next section, nuclear threats formed an unarguably successful stratagem for Russia throughout the spring and summer of 2022. But these threats became less plausible with repetition. The same applied to more generic intimidatory language from Russia, as when, in mid-September 2022, Moscow’s ambassador to Washington, Anatoliy Antonov, warned that supplying Ukraine with ATACMS missiles would mean the US ‘may get involved in a military conflict with Russia’. As reactions in the West to statements of this kind evolved from alarm to something more like derision, there was palpable frustration among those delivering the Kremlin’s messages that threat inflation meant each repetition had progressively less effect. This was evident when, in Putin’s televised address of 21 September, having pointed to the possible use of nuclear weapons, he added: ‘This is not a bluff.’ The effect was to reduce the credibility of what he was saying: a substantial proportion of subsequent Western analysis included the observation that the only people who need to say that something is not a bluff are habitual bluffers.
This may be one of the reasons for a marked diminuendo in Russian nuclear threat language in the last few months of 2022. The German Institute for Security and International Affairs (SWP), in a detailed chronology of nuclear messaging between Russia and the West, notes a de-escalatory trend starting in July–August 2022. The final months of the year saw a more pronounced rolling back of nuclear rhetoric from Russian official sources, including – with occasional exceptions like his 21 September address – Putin himself. By the spring of 2023, Putin’s language of threat was subdued, and appeared to follow a familiar routine of a vague promise of unspecified consequences for each new element of Western support for Ukraine. In March, he responded to reports that the UK would supply the Ukrainian military with armour-piercing shells containing depleted uranium by stating, once again, that ‘Russia will be forced to respond in an appropriate manner’.
It has been plausibly argued that the easing of nuclear threats by Russia also followed firm messages from China in public and private that this kind of loose talk was undesirable. This argument was supported by language used in China’s ‘Position on the Political Settlement of the Ukraine Crisis’, released on 24 February 2023, that included explicit criticism of nuclear threats.
But a de-escalation in nuclear threats from the latter part of 2022 may also have resulted from a realization in Moscow that the rhetoric was bringing diminishing returns – and not just through overuse. The credibility of Russia’s threats could also be measured against the reality of events on the ground, which consistently failed to trigger the threatened consequences. As observed in a paper published by Estonia’s ministry of defence in early February 2023:
This dawning realization contributed to a greater willingness in the West to recognize the gap between Russian rhetoric and intent. Also in early February, the headline of an article published in the New York Times stated that fears of Russian nuclear weapons use ‘have diminished’. The article quoted unnamed ‘administration officials’ describing a more sober and balanced approach to threatening language from Russia, in phrases that were strikingly similar to key passages in the earlier version of this paper.
Where more alarmist reports of Russia’s threats still feature in English-language media, these are by now amplified primarily by established pro-Russia voices and media outlets; or are repeated without caveat to support arguments in favour of withdrawing support for Ukraine and instead putting pressure on Kyiv to accept defeat, in the form of Russian control of Ukrainian territory, in order to end the war.
Success through nuclear threats
Nevertheless, the US administration’s search for Russia’s ‘red lines’ – and the assumption that these red lines exist – continues at the time of writing. This is because a focus on Russian nuclear intimidation instead of on sober analysis of the actual likelihood of nuclear use has already contributed to substantial success for Russia in shaping the behaviour of the US and its Western allies. Threatening language from senior Russian leaders and from Russia’s state media during 2022 built on a long-established and intensive programme of messaging via propagandists and influencers to inculcate in Western audiences the assumption that nuclear use is likely if Russia is obstructed or offended, and that ‘miscalculation’ between Russia and a NATO member state would inescapably escalate to full-scale conflict including nuclear exchanges. Tireless repetition of the mantra that any one of a wide range of events that Russia would dislike would ensure ‘guaranteed escalation to the Third World War’ had its intended effect; and the assessment of nuclear use as credible in turn constrained Western policy in opposition to Russia.
This assessment has been widespread across Western media, which unintentionally fulfils a key function in disseminating and amplifying Russia’s messaging. But this function is reinforced by those Western politicians and senior officials who also respond to Russian nuclear threats in precisely the manner Moscow would wish them to. This repeating and implicit validation of Russia’s messages is not restricted to Europe: as Kristin Ven Bruusgaard, the director of the Norwegian Intelligence School, observes, even the US ‘has repeatedly warned that a flustered Russia may actually be willing to use nuclear weapons’.
The preconception that nuclear use by Russia is not only possible but probable if Russia is challenged or threatened, let alone defeated or ‘humiliated’, has been deliberately fostered by long-term Russian propaganda efforts.
In this way, the preconception that nuclear use by Russia is not only possible but probable if Russia is challenged or threatened, let alone defeated or ‘humiliated’, has been deliberately fostered by long-term Russian propaganda efforts. This has led in the West to interpretations of the evidence for and against this probability that are alarmist rather than objective. Reports in November 2022 that Russia’s military leadership had discussed use of nuclear weapons in Ukraine have been widely cited as being highly concerning. In fact, they should cause no additional concern, and should even provide a measure of reassurance; the option has indeed been discussed and, as expected, rejected – as evidenced by the fact that nuclear weapons have not been used. Threats by Russia to use Sarmat and Poseidon weapons systems have been widely reported, without the crucial qualifier that they were plainly implausible because these systems were not yet in service. Previously, just days after the start of the February 2022 invasion, Putin announced that Russia’s nuclear forces had been placed on a ‘special mode of combat duty’. The phrase was not one recognized by Russian or foreign experts on those forces, leading to later assessments that it was quite possibly meaningless. US officials have consistently observed that Russia’s public bombast has not at any point been supported by evidence of plans to actually use nuclear weapons, or of any change in Russia’s actual nuclear posture. Nevertheless, as with other empty phrases such as the ‘NATO infrastructure’ that Moscow claimed for decades was ‘approaching Russia’, the lack of substance did not prevent the statement gaining traction in the West. A year later, it was being repeated as fact in authoritative analysis that Putin had placed his country’s strategic nuclear weapons on ‘high alert’ at the start of the war – accompanied by continuing speculation on what this may have meant in practice.
The challenge for Western media is clear; weighing the arguments for reporting Russian statements against the recognition that, by doing so, those media are allowing themselves to be used as a tool by Russia. The choice a given media outlet makes has direct impact. In one recent study, using the example of threats by Russia’s deputy foreign minister Sergei Ryabkov, Jyri Lavikainen of the Finnish Institute of International Affairs has demonstrated that when Russian propaganda is ignored by Western media, the messaging has no impact.
The clearest example of the effects of this long-term Russian campaign has been successful deterrence of Ukraine’s Western backers, including the US, from providing war-winning military support. Western powers have been consistently careful not to give the Ukrainian armed forces weapons that could threaten Russia. Assistance has been carefully calibrated, with Ukraine’s allies feeling for Russia’s red lines and proceeding only once it has become clear that these are fictitious. Russian threats of escalation have repeatedly been explicitly referred to by German chancellor Olaf Scholz as a rationale for impeding or constraining support for Ukraine, on the grounds that Scholz wishes to ‘do everything to avoid an escalation that could lead to World War III – there can be no nuclear war’. Successful deterrence, and the associated fear of a situation where Russia suffers a defeat, also continues to lead to arguments for a ceasefire in Ukraine as a preferable outcome to a Ukrainian victory.
In other words, the West’s repeated emphasis of its fear of escalation proves to Russia that threats work, irrespective of how implausible they may be or how often they have been shown to be empty. Regardless of the intensity with which they are currently being delivered, Russia’s nuclear threats continue to have their desired effect for as long as Western leaders like Scholz or US president Joe Biden continue to state clearly that they are effective in preventing Ukraine being provided with the military support that it needs to win the war, and even in preventing them from offering Ukraine unqualified support in evicting Russian forces from the whole of Ukrainian sovereign territory.
