Submission Statement
The taboo against nuclear use is perhaps the most widely adopted norm in human history. Russia is no exception to this, and despite the strategic debacle unfolding in Ukraine, the Russian nuclear arsenal has shown few signs of activation. By contrast, Russia has leaned heavily on nuclear signaling, where the use of nuclear weapons is heavily implied through state and quasi-state channels to achieve policy goals.
One such signaling effort has unfolded over the past week, taking the form of a cascade of articles surrounding the idea of a limited nuclear strike against Ukraine. Remarkably, these articles touch tangentially if at all on using nuclear weapons to generate battlefield effects. Instead, nuclear usage here is framed as a signal intended to coerce Western powers into giving Russia political concessions. In this sense, the discourse can be seen as an outgrowth of continuing messaging by the Kremlin attempting to reframe its war in Ukraine as an existential struggle of East vs. West.
An interesting aspect of these articles is that they are(for the most part) not explicitly state-sanctioned. They are being published by websites that are not explicitly connected with Russian government sources, and by intellectuals that are not traditionally considered government mouthpieces. Nearly simultaneously, Russia has moved nuclear weapons to Belarus, and Putin announced that the Sarmat nuclear weapon was nearly complete. The likely intent is to communicate a whole-of-society debate on the nuclear bomb, intending to indicate to the West a larger conversation is being had around nuclear weapons, and therefore potentially a larger consensus could be reached regarding their use. Putin’s saber-rattling is easy to dismiss as empty threats, but a half dozen experts must at least be considered as an indication of broader trends in Russian intellectual spheres.
While Twitter links are ordinarily not sufficiently credible for this forum, the thread linked above is an aggregation of other, more mainstream sources. Given the novel nature of active nuclear signaling by a major power, the number of articles that were connected to the signaling effort, and the qualifications of the Twitter user herself, I felt the thread was the best to link to.
I find Russia’s nuclear signaling in this conflict absolutely fascinating. I almost wish I was back in grad school so I could write my thesis about it. Just a few days ago, we had Putin out in public saying Russia was not going to use nuclear weapons, reiterating the doctrine in such a way as to be threatening but also reasonable. “Russia has no need to use them and we’re doing everything in our power to avoid a situation where we have to use them.” Two days later, Karaganov the Kremlin Whisperer and somewhat respected Russian intellectual (prior to the war) drops an article about how the Russians should launch a preventative retaliatory nuclear strike on central Europe. This has sparked a “debate” among Russian state-controlled media about whether or not this is a good idea. There was some light pushback, enough to show that Russia is not insane of course, but not enough to end the “debate” strongly in favor of one side or another.
Now two days later, Dimitri Trenin (who admittedly has been on the nutso train since this war started), an intellectual with close ties to the West (he served as a non-NATO senior researcher at the NATO defense college, among many other things) is parroting Karaganov’s insanity. The idea here is clearly to indicate to the West, namely Europeans, that serious Russian thinkers with serious ties to the Kremlin are seriously considering the nuclear option. Clearly, instead of having Putin run out and rattle the saber or having Medvedev drunkenly fire off some bullshit, Russia is leaning hard on the “well now look here Euros, even smart men, men you respected, are talking about nukes now.” It’s meant to show that nuclear use isn’t some fantasy of the Kremlin or bluster, but rather a genuine consideration and discourse among the Russian elite and Russian society as a whole. It’s a fascinating tact to take. It shows commitment to the cause from the elite, it shows the idea that Russian society is seriously capable of considering this, and it genuinely makes the threat feel more holistic and real. It’s also an explicit targeting of Europe, not Ukraine, which is a shift I would say in the Kremlin implicit threats. Because these intellectuals have ties to the Kremlin, it also sparks Western intellectuals to say things like, “Well, this is clearly the Kremlin messaging, should we take this more seriously etc etc” which perpetuates the discourse. Tie it to the whole Belarus nuclear move and Russia is doing an excellent job of keeping its big leverage tool, the nukes, shoehorned into the news cycle/social media discourse of the West during this counteroffensive, keeping it there so everyone remembers that if Ukraine goes too far, they’ll do the big bad thing.