Earlier this week, both chambers of Russia’s parliament signed treaties annexing Ukraine’s territories of Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia to Russia.
Russian President Vladimir Putin signed legislation on Wednesday incorporating four Ukrainian territories into Russia, completing the illegal annexation.
Both houses of the Russian parliament adopted treaties incorporating the Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia regions into Russia earlier this week. The formality came after the Kremlin-managed “referendums” in four regions that Ukraine and the West condemned as fraud.
Will President Vladimir Putin use nuclear weapons if tensions with the West rise?
There is no more critical – or difficult – subject for Kremlin watchers than determining whether Russian President Vladimir Putin’s nuclear warnings are merely bluffs. For the time being, analysts caution that the probability of Putin using the world’s largest nuclear arsenal remains low. According to the CIA, no signals of a Russian nuclear assault are near.
Nonetheless, his pledge to employ “all means at our disposal” to defend Russia while waging war in Ukraine is being taken extremely seriously.
And his allegation on Friday that the United States “set a precedent” by dropping atomic bombs on Japan during WWII raised the stakes even higher.
If Putin goes nuclear, the White House has warned of “catastrophic consequences for Russia”.
But whether this will keep Putin in power is anyone’s guess. Nervous Kremlin observers admit they don’t know what he’s thinking or even if he’s sensible and well-informed.
The former KGB operative has shown a willingness to take risks and go to the edge. Even Western intelligence services equipped with spy satellites struggle to determine whether Putin is bluffing or actually intends to breach the nuclear taboo.
“In the US intelligence community today, we don’t see any practical evidence that he’s getting closer to real use, that there’s an imminent threat of using tactical nuclear weapons”, CIA Director William Burns told CBS News.
Burns stated, “What we need to do is take it seriously, keep an eye out for indicators of actual preparations.” Kremlin watchers are puzzled, in part because they don’t see how nuclear force could significantly assist Russia in reversing its military defeats in Ukraine.
The Ukrainian army is not using significant numbers of tanks to retake territory, and combat is sometimes limited to settlements.
So, what might Russian nuclear forces aim at in order to win?
“Nuclear weapons are hardly a magic wand,” said Andrey Baklitskiy, a nuclear risk expert at the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research.
“They aren’t something you just hire and they solve all of your problems.” Analysts hope that the taboo around nuclear weapons acts as a deterrent. The awful extent of human suffering in Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the United States dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities on August 6 and 9, 1945, was a persuasive argument against the use of such weapons again.
210,000 individuals were killed in the attacks. Since then, no country has used a nuclear bomb. Analysts believe Putin will struggle to become the first world leader since US President Harry Truman to unleash nuclear fire. “It is still a taboo in Russia to pass that level”, said Dara Massicot, a senior policy researcher at RAND Corp. and a former US Defense Department analyst of Russian military capabilities. “One of the most important decisions in Earth’s history,” Baklitskiy stated.
Putin may become a global pariah as a result of the backlash. “Breaking the nuclear taboo would effectively isolate Russia diplomatically and economically”, said Sidharth Kaushal, a defence and security expert at the Royal United Services Institute in London.
Long-range nuclear weapons that Russia may employ in a direct fight with the US are ready for action. However, its inventories of shorter-range warheads—so-called tactical weapons that Putin may be tempted to employ in Ukraine—are not, according to analysts.
“All of those weapons are in storage”, said Pavel Podvig, a senior researcher specialising in nuclear weapons at the UN’s Geneva-based disarmament think tank.
He says, “You have to pull them out of the bunker, load them on trucks”, before marrying them with missiles or other delivery systems.
Russia has not made a complete inventory of its tactical nuclear weapons and their capabilities public. Putin may instruct that a smaller one be secretly prepared and teed up for surprise use. However, openly withdrawing weapons from storage is another approach Putin may use to apply pressure without using them. He’d expect US satellites to detect the activity and would believe that baring his nuclear teeth would frighten Western nations into withdrawing assistance to Ukraine.
“That’s exactly what the Russians would be betting on, that each escalation provides the other side with both a threat and (also) an exit to engage with Russia,” added Kaushal.
“There is a sort of language to nuclear signalling and brinksmanship, and a logic to it that is more than just, you know, one crazy one-day decides to do this sort of thing,” he continued.
Analysts predict that other escalations will come first, such as more Russian strikes in Ukraine using non-nuclear weapons.
“I don’t think there will be a bolt from the blue,” said Nikolai Sokov, a former Russian Foreign Ministry official who now works for the Vienna Center for Disarmament and Non-Proliferation.
Analysts are also struggling to identify battlefield objectives worth the exorbitant price Putin would pay.
Will he attack again and again if one nuclear strike does not stop Ukrainian advances?
Podvig pointed out that the war lacks “huge concentrations of troops” to attack. Striking cities with the intention of frightening Ukraine into submission would be a terrible option.
“It’s a difficult decision to kill tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people in cold blood”, he stated.
“Exactly how it should be.” Putin may be expecting that threats alone would halt Western weapons supply to Ukraine, giving him time to train the 300,000 more troops he’s mobilising, sparking demonstrations and an exodus of service-aged men.
Analysts fear that if Ukraine continues to roll back the invasion and Putin finds himself unable to keep what he has taken, he will decide that his non-nuclear alternatives have run out.
“With mobilisation and annexing new territory, Putin is really tearing down a lot of bridges behind him right now”, RAND‘s Massicot agreed.
“It implies that he is fully committed to winning this on his terms,” she continued. “I am quite concerned about where that finally leads us—including, in the end, a nuclear decision.”
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