His ominous warnings, delivered at the end of a two-day trip to North Korea and Vietnam, lured Russia and the West into a new round of escalation over Ukraine. The warnings came at a time of unrest among Kiev’s main supporters and political uncertainty, with potentially game-changing elections approaching in the United States and France.
Besides using nuclear weapons or causing more destruction on the Ukrainian battlefield, Russia’s leader is trying to demonstrate that he can pressure and anger the West in other ways and elsewhere.
“I worry that we are stuck in a vicious cycle where policymakers have an illusion of control,” said Alexander Gabuev, director of the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center. “The real danger in the current situation is that Russia is ready to act as a spoiler and is determined to make the West pay for its military support for Ukraine — and it is ready to take actions that are irreversible, such as sharing advanced military technology with North Korea.”
With Western officials more numb to Putin’s threats than they were in the early days of a war, the Russian leader has changed the content of his threats and raised their volume, at one point asking rhetorically on Thursday that if the West was indeed seeking “strategic defeat,” why didn’t Moscow “stay the course” — an apparent reference to nuclear war.
From the beginning, Putin used the threat of nuclear war to prevent Western countries from supporting Ukraine. When he launches a full-scale invasion in early 2022He warned any country considering intervention that they would face consequences “never seen in history”.
Initially, the threat worked. President Joe Biden’s administration has made avoiding nuclear war the North Star of its Ukraine policy. The United States and its allies have not provided Kyiv with a full arsenal of sophisticated weaponry because they fear Putin would launch a nuclear strike or direct retaliation against a NATO member.
Critics of this restriction debate It deprived Ukraine of its best chance for victory in the first year of the invasion, when Russia was losing badly on the battlefield and Ukraine still had a large number of well-trained personnel.
But supporters say the approach has allowed the West to deliver weapons to Ukraine that would have prompted a stronger Kremlin response if delivered all at once. Ukraine’s allies have gradually increased the sophistication and scope of weapons deliveries, first with HIMARS missile launchers and later with tanks and F-16 fighter jets, a strategy some Western officials have likened to boiling a frog.
The latest change — allowing Ukraine to conduct limited strikes against Russia to defend against a cross-border attack — appears to have stressed Putin. Since the shift, he has frequently mentioned his nuclear arsenal and suggested other ways Russia could escalate its response to the West.
Skeptics of Putin’s comments say they see no reason for him to use nuclear weapons. A senior NATO official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said NATO believes it is “unlikely” that Putin would use nuclear weapons in a conflict and has not seen any changes in Russia’s nuclear posture that would indicate Putin would use nuclear weapons.
But Putin showed in Pyongyang that he could take steps short of launching nuclear weapons to distance himself from Ukraine and still unsettle the United States and its allies.
The Russian leader’s willingness to tout the possibility of supplying Pyongyang with weapons, something that would have been unthinkable earlier in Putin’s presidency, suggests that the war in Ukraine has become a distinct, defining tenet of Putin’s foreign policy and rule.
“Russia’s foreign policy now revolves around war,” Gabuev said. “Every relationship has three goals: First, support the Russian military machine; second, support the Russian economy, which is under sanctions; and third, how do I use this relationship to punish the United States and its allies for their support for Ukraine?”
That unease may extend beyond allowing Kim Jong-un to carry weapons. Comment Putin’s comments in St. Petersburg earlier this month led some analysts to believe he was considering a The Houthis are Yemeni Shiite militias backed by Iran who have been attacking U.S. ships and aircraft in and around the Red Sea.or other groups hostile to the United States and its allies.
Skeptics of Mr. Putin’s nuclear threat believe that Russia is in the driver’s seat on Ukraine, making him unlikely to take any drastic action that could further mobilize supporters in Kiev or jeopardize his own trajectory on the battlefield. Former President Donald J. Trump, who made clear he did not like the United States spending money on Ukraine, could return to the White House in seven months.
“If Russia fundamentally believes that the future is better than the past, then the likelihood of using nuclear weapons is very small,” said Nigel Gould-Davies, a senior fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies and a former British ambassador to Belarus.
But some analysts worry that the West’s indifference to Putin’s warnings has created a precarious situation.
In Moscow, a foreign policy expert who has advised the Kremlin acknowledged that Russia sometimes cries “wolf” but “the wolf never appears.”
The person familiar with the matter said there is a growing belief in Moscow that Russia’s threats to the West are not convincing enough and that a slight de-escalation of the atmosphere is necessary.
In addition to supplying weapons to U.S. adversaries such as North Korea and Iran, experts in Moscow are discussing the possibility of cyber or space attacks, said the person, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he feared retaliation for speaking to the U.S. news media.
Andrea Kendall-Taylor, a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, said there is now a heightened risk of accidental escalation, where one side takes actions based on a misunderstanding of the other side’s actions. For example, U.S. officials recently Expressing concerns Misconceptions about the Kremlin Ukraine attacks Russian websites This is part of Moscow’s nuclear early warning system.
“I think our focus on nuclear escalation has distracted us from understanding all the ways he has escalated in this area,” Ms Kendall-Taylor said.
Analysts say illegal arms transfers or increased sabotage attacks outside Ukraine’s borders are logical escalatory moves for Putin given Russia’s unique Soviet legacy — global influence, weapons-making prowess and an intelligence service that excels in unconventional warfare.
“People criticize Russia and say it’s a declining power,” said Popo Rowe, a nonresident fellow at the Lowy Institute in Sydney, Australia, and a former Australian diplomat in Moscow. “But it remains a powerful disruptive force. That’s its comparative advantage. It has not only the ability to disrupt, but also the will.”
Anton Troyanovsky and Lara Jacks Contributed reporting.
