Vladimir Putin

Marc Champion, Tribune News Service

President Vladimir Putin has outlined a much-trailed change to his nuclear doctrine, leading to predictable warnings of a radioactive Armageddon should the US let Ukraine use American-made mid-range missiles against targets in Russia. That was, of course, his purpose.  The latest change of doctrine should be seen as an attempt by the Kremlin to restore credibility to nuclear threats that have begun to lose their power. It does nothing to remove the enormous hurdles to actually following through with a nuclear attack.

But Russia is sending out other, more plausible, escalation warnings that have gotten less attention. One, perhaps ironically, came via Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky, when he said his intelligence services had discovered that Russia’s military were planning to take Ukraine’s remaining nuclear power plants offline by bombing them. This could happen.  Russia’s pre-winter missile attacks on Ukraine’s power grid have been successful, causing tens of thousands to flee their homes already, rather than try to survive a winter in unheated apartment blocks.

There are few more politically potent actions Putin could take to shatter Europe’s will to continue supporting Kyiv’s war effort than to cause another wave of refugees to rival the millions who fled in 2022.  An attack on a nuclear power plant could hope to disconnect it from the grid without hitting a reactor and causing a second Chernobyl. Yet the profound recklessness of such a move would signal better than any doctrinal change Putin’s willingness to entertain nuclear fallout, whether at a power plant or as a result of a nuclear strike.  Zelensky’s claims aren’t verified. He may have been playing to the global audience gathered in New York for the United Nations General Assembly. Or his intelligence agencies may have heard what the Kremlin wanted them to hear. Either way, the threat is plausible. 

Putin threatened something like this in June, saying that if the US and its allies were giving Ukraine longer-range missiles to strike Russia, he could reciprocate by supplying missiles to US enemies around the globe. This threat, again, is plausible and would put both commercial shipping through the Suez and the naval vessels sent to protect them at significantly greater risk. Especially given its state of isolation due to sanctions, Russia has far less to lose from disruption of this global trade route.

These kinds of signals should be seen as weapons in and of themselves, which makes it vital to distinguish between what’s real and feigned. In his brief, televised Sept. 25 remarks to a nuclear session of Russia’s security council, Putin said two things of note. The first was that from now on, Russia will consider an attack on its territory by a non-nuclear state that’s backed by a nuclear one as a joint effort. The second was that any conventional massed aerial assault on Russia would be sufficient cause for a nuclear response.

It’s easy to conflate these points, reading them as a threat that if, say, Ukraine were to fire a British-made Storm Shadow cruise missile at an airfield or arms depot inside Russia, the new doctrine would allow for a nuclear strike on both Ukraine and Britain. Putin can of course do whatever he wants, but that isn’t what he said. The second point about the threshold being a “massive” assault matters — one Storm Shadow is not that.

In fact, the doctrinal change is less important to the ongoing debate over whether Washington should lift restrictions on Ukraine’s use of the ATACMS short-range ballistic missiles and Storm Shadows it’s been given. The larger question is how the US would respond if Russia were to break the nuclear taboo in pursuit of its war goals in Ukraine.

The US has made it known that it probably wouldn’t respond with some kind of nuclear tit-for-tat, avoiding the potential for rapid and catastrophic escalation. Instead, it has threatened a massive conventional intervention, in which it would inflict heavy damage on Russia’s military capabilities.

But in a sense this misses the point. Russia’s nuclear doctrine is a political document. It creates a framework for the operational procedures that control nuclear use and never see light of day. The public doctrine is designed to be vague enough that the commander-in-chief can take more or less any decision on nuclear use he deems necessary, while sending out signals of Russian intent.

The Kremlin has used this kind of nuclear signaling to impose an excess of caution on the pace and sophistication of military aid to Ukraine. This tactic has a long pedigree, dating back to a technique adopted by the Soviet military in the 1970s, called “reflexive control.”

The goal, according to a paper written for the Dutch military in 2018, was to first understand and then influence the decision-making assumptions of an enemy, such that they end up making choices that are detrimental for them, but beneficial to Moscow. That involves reshaping narratives, so that once the other side sits down to decide how to act, it happens within a framework that was designed in Moscow.

Russia’s nuclear threats have been tested as the US and its European allies have crossed one imagined red line after another. Putin was never going to push his red button, but that doesn’t mean he won’t push others.