Russian President Vladimir Putin raised the specter of nuclear war over Ukraine this week, a threat that strikes Western observers as both “crazy” and an effort to rig the diplomatic game in his favor.
“He goes pretty far,” Atlantic Council visiting fellow Petr Tuma, a career Czech diplomat seconded at the Washington, D.C.,-based think tank, told the Washington Examiner. “It’s crazy to even mention something like this.”
Yet Putin broached the subject during a joint press conference with French President Emmanuel Macron, who had traveled to Moscow in search of a way to avert a major new Russian offensive against Ukraine. It’s a shocking rhetorical maneuver by conventional diplomatic standards, but trans-Atlantic officials and analysts regard it as just the latest Kremlin effort to use the threat of violence to gain leverage in negotiations with Western officials.
“He perceives that it works as a deterrent against the West, to talk about nuclear weapons, to talk about nuclear war,” a senior European official told the Washington Examiner. “It’s not something that you hear that often in the West because people have a long-held taboo that nuclear war is not winnable and that modern countries don’t threaten each other with nuclear war.”
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Putin and President Joe Biden affirmed the principle that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought,” but Western officials believe that Russian military strategists have developed nuclear weapons that they regard as substantial enough to win a conflict in Europe without provoking a full-scale nuclear response from the United States. Against that backdrop, Putin described a hypothetical crisis in which he would feel obliged to use nuclear weapons to defend Russia’s control of Crimea, a peninsula that he annexed from Ukraine in 2014.
“If Ukraine joins NATO and decides to take Crimea back through military means, the European countries will automatically get drawn into a military conflict with Russia? Of course, NATO’s united potential and that of Russia are incomparable,” Putin said this week, per an official Kremlin transcript. “We understand that, but we also understand that Russia is one of the world’s leading nuclear powers and is superior to many of those countries in terms of the number of modern nuclear force components. But there will be no winners, and you will find yourself drawn into this conflict against your will.”
That scenario links Putin’s most recent demand, a ban on NATO’s enlargement, to the Russian annexation of Crimea that sent trans-Atlantic ties with the Kremlin into a tailspin and began the festering hostilities between Russia and Ukraine. Yet it depends on multiple factors that have little chance of coming to pass, according to trans-Atlantic observers. Ukraine has desired to join NATO for years, but the alliance has declined to offer a membership action plan that would allow Kyiv to make progress toward that goal.
“If Ukraine were in NATO, they would not attack to try to take back Crimea. They wouldn’t,” former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Bill Taylor told the Washington Examiner. “They’d be constrained by the rest of the NATO alliance.”
Putin would have to be very ignorant of the NATO accession process to believe that Ukraine would be allowed to join if such a result were even possible, according to the senior European official.
“I don’t think that the way he has raised the issue of Crimea and — as he would put it, the potential nuclear war — that this is accidental,” the senior European official said of Putin. “However, his assessment regarding how exactly the alliance works and how exactly the alliance accepts new members may not be 100% in touch with reality.”
That official and Taylor both surmised that Putin is making such threats in order to intimidate Western leaders, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, in the interlocking diplomatic disputes over the resolution of the conflict in eastern Ukraine and Kyiv’s long-term desire to join NATO. Russian military forces have made serious preparations for a major assault on Ukraine just as Putin pressures Zelensky to acquiesce to a Russian rewrite of Ukraine’s constitution while demanding that the U.S. and Western European members of NATO restrict their military cooperation with Eastern European allies.
“So far, President Zelensky and President Biden are standing firm, and Putin is probably worried that he’s going to have to blink first,” said Taylor. “So then he pulls out this rhetoric about nuclear [war], which is irresponsible … but my theory is he’s getting desperate. His attempt to rattle [and] intimidate President Zelensky and President Biden so far is not working, and so he’s reaching further.”
Still, Taylor acknowledged that Putin’s statement can’t be ignored by Western strategists. “He has invaded countries before, including Ukraine, so you can never tell,” he said. “So you can’t dismiss it, and so you can never tell.”
Tuma, the Czech diplomat at the Atlantic Council, echoed Taylor’s analysis while acknowledging that some analysts fear that Putin might “take crazy decisions” if he does not get his way at the negotiating table.
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“People are worried that he might be crazy enough to use [nuclear weapons], but me personally, I still think … he doesn’t mean it really,” Tuma said. “He wants us to make concessions.”
