Russian President Vladimir Putin dismissed the prospect of an “upcoming nuclear war” with the United States despite recent Russian predictions of a “large-scale military conflict” with NATO.
“Bite your tongue,” Putin told a reporter who broached the topic during his annual press conference on Thursday. “An upcoming nuclear war — what are you talking about?”
Putin’s rebuke suggests that atomic warfare exceeds the limits of Russia’s willingness to raise the specter of conflict with the U.S. or its allies. Putin and other Russian officials routinely argue that U.S. forces are encircling Russia, an allegation that haunts numerous foreign policy disagreements between the former Cold War rivals.
“In the Baltic countries and Poland, the Black and Baltic seas, military activity is intensifying, the intensity of the bloc’s military exercises is rising,” Valery Gerasimov, Putin’s top military official, said earlier this week. “Their scenarios point to NATO’s targeted preparation for engaging its forces in a large-scale military conflict.”
The U.S. and other NATO allies have deployed small military contingents to Eastern Europe in response to Russia’s annexation of Crimea and occupation of eastern Ukraine, which is not a member of NATO. That conflict alarms other former Soviet vassal states that have joined the transatlantic alliance, such as Lithuania, where 500 American troops arrived in September as part of a temporary rotation.
“It’s been the narrative since the Cold War, the narrative of the Soviet Union as well: ‘Everybody’s against us,’” Alisa Muzergues, a foreign policy analyst at GLOBSEC in the Slovak Republic, told the Washington Examiner. “And it’s basically just the creation of enemies. I think it works more for [Russia’s] national population, this messaging, even than outside [of Russia].”
The comments also reflect Russia’s broader hostility to the idea of former Soviet satellite states moving into a Western orbit. “They still see it as a belt of their own influence, and they don’t want, also, a successful example on their border because they understand that it will create some turmoil inside Russia as well,” Muzergues said.
Gerasimov issued his World War III prediction in the lead-up to his first meeting with U.S. Army Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The officials huddled in Switzerland on Wednesday.
“The two military leaders discussed Syria, strategic stability, and a variety of operational and strategic issues to enhance deconfliction and improve understanding to reduce risk,” Joint Staff spokeswoman Air Force Col. DeDe S. Halfhill said after the meeting.
Gerasimov is widely regarded as a leader of Russia’s “hybrid warfare” tactics, Muzergues recalled, and he may have aired his complaint about NATO as a rhetorical tactic aimed at that dialogue with Milley.
“He’s been saying a lot of stuff in public,” the GLOBSEC analyst said. “Sometimes, it didn’t correspond at all actually to what they were doing.”
