Would Russian President Vladimir Putin be so reckless as to use a nuclear weapon against Ukraine?
This most loaded of questions is circling over Washington like a storm cloud. Putin doesn’t appear to be making idle threats. Last month, the Russian strongman again implied that if Russia’s military position in Ukraine were degraded any further, the use of a tactical nuclear weapon would be a live option.
Nobody knows what’s going on inside Putin’s head. Conventional wisdom and common sense strongly suggest that a nuclear attack on Ukraine, whether against Ukrainian troop concentrations or conducted as a symbolic show of force in an open area, would be a highly costly affair for Putin. India and China, the two countries that have bailed Moscow out with gargantuan purchases of Russian crude oil (albeit at a hefty discount), wouldn’t take too kindly to a nuclear event. The notion that Putin could turn around a flailing war effort in Ukraine by going nuclear is also dubious.
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Still, contrary to pre-war presumptions, it turns out that Putin is anything but a Svengali. Instead, he’s a mere mortal prone to making big mistakes that backfire badly for Russia. Putin’s poor decision-making seems also to find foundation in the fact that he is generally surrounded by yes men who fear giving him information he doesn’t want to hear. Alongside his unwillingness to budge on policy one iota (Russia’s stated policy remains regime change in Kyiv), we need to take Putin’s nuclear threats seriously.
That’s precisely what the Biden administration is doing. While nuclear escalation is still a low-probability event, it’s not zero, which means the United States has a responsibility to plan for this hypothetical.
As Biden told CNN’s Jake Tapper on Tuesday, the Defense Department has planned for such a scenario. It’s possible Putin could decide that using a tactical nuke might stabilize the Russian military’s defensive lines or compel Kyiv to negotiate on Moscow’s terms. Of course, a Russian nuclear attack would likely produce the opposite effect, galvanizing the Ukrainian population to fight until full military victory is achieved. It may sound a bit loony for those of us stateside, but for a man like Putin, whose entire legacy is now tied to a war the Russians are losing, the nuclear option may not be a stretch.
The American problem: The two planks of U.S. policy in Ukraine — ensuring a Russian defeat and minimizing the prospects of a direct confrontation with Moscow — are increasingly incompatible. The more success Ukraine has on the battlefield, the more likely Putin is to respond with escalation. No U.S. policymaker, academic, or analyst has come up with a convincing way to thread this finest of needles.
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Daniel DePetris (@DanDePetris) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. His opinions are his own.
