Ukraine’s president doesn’t think the Russian army’s slow roll through his country is enough to press Vladimir Putin into using nuclear weapons.
In an interview with the German newspaper Die Zeit this week, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said he didn’t take the Russian president’s threats seriously. Putin put his country’s nuclear forces on “high alert” late last month, days after he started his invasion.
“I think that the threat of nuclear war is a bluff,” Zelensky told the German paper, according to the Hill. “It’s one thing to be a murderer. It’s another to commit suicide. Every use of nuclear weapons means the end for all sides, not just for the person using them.”
Russian forces have faced a more resistant Ukraine than they expected, and Putin’s nuclear announcement may have been a way to intimidate the defiant forces, Dakota S. Rudesill, an associate professor at the Mershon Center for International Security Studies at Ohio State University, told Al Jazeera.
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Russia is one of nine countries that has nuclear weapons, and it has more nuclear warheads than any other country, including the United States, according to the Arms Control Association.
Putin’s nuclear announcement shocked many, but U.S. intelligence officials have said there isn’t cause for concern yet.
“We are watching very closely for movements, anything related to his strategic nuclear forces,” Avril Haines, President Joe Biden’s director of national intelligence, testified earlier this week. “And we’re not seeing something at this stage that indicates that he is doing something different than we have seen in the past.”
Haines held a similar line to Rudesill, saying that Putin’s threats of nuclear action were meant to signal that NATO should not get involved in Ukraine.
“Our analysts assess that Putin’s current posturing in this arena is intended to deter the West from providing additional support to Ukraine as he weighs an escalation of the conflict,” she said.
After years of war in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region, and the more immediate conflict spreading throughout the country and into the capital, Zelensky said it was a “mistake” for Ukraine to have given up its nuclear weapons in 1994. That deal sent Ukraine’s nuclear arms to Russia to be destroyed, and in return, Ukraine received “financial compensation, economic assistance, and essential security assurances” from the U.S. and the United Kingdom, with Russia recognizing Ukraine’s “independence and sovereignty” and specifying its existing borders could be changed “only peacefully by mutual agreement.”
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Now, 28 years later, Zelensky doesn’t believe Russia is willing to use nuclear arms to conquer his country, but he also doesn’t believe that lines are being redrawn “peacefully by mutual agreement.”
“Who in the world would still trust the power of treaties? And that’s why severely punishing Russia would mean restoring the power of international law,” he told Die Zeit. “The West is capable of that.”
