OPINION:
Seeking to buttress his self-proclaimed image as the defender of a besieged Russia just before his pseudo-landslide reelection victory in March, President Vladimir Putin told voters that the Kremlin would be ready for nuclear war with the West.
In his annual State of the Nation address, Mr. Putin warned that the U.S. and its allies would risk nuclear war if they deployed their troops to Ukraine to help fight off a Russian invasion force. As Finland was preparing to join NATO, the Russian leader added menacingly that there would be serious consequences, including “nuclear weapons and the risk of WWIII.”
And earlier this month, Mr. Putin’s stalking horse Dmitry Medvedev, former president and current deputy national security adviser, admonished the West that Russia was prepared to use tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine. Responding to the Biden administration’s giving Kyiv the green light to launch U.S.-supplied short-range artillery at military targets in Russia itself to defend the beleaguered city of Kharkiv, Mr. Medvedev said Moscow’s nuclear saber rattling was “neither intimidation nor bluffing.”
Russia has more than 6,000 nuclear warheads, including over 1,000 warheads on over 500 intercontinental ballistic missiles, submarine-launched missiles and bombers. The Kremlin has ramped up the reckless rhetorical nuclear brinkmanship in direct proportion to Russia’s massive losses on the battlefield in Ukraine since the invasion began in February 2022.
Mr. Putin’s nuclear threats induced NATO members, in particular the U.S., to withhold or delay the provision of military equipment and ammunition, which Ukraine needed to stay in the fight for its survival.
Mr. Putin’s barbaric war has backfired in spectacular ways: hundreds of thousands of Russian casualties; NATO membership for Finland and Sweden; and a Europe awakened from its post-Cold War slumber with a commitment to bigger defense budgets.
Mr. Putin’s only success has been the use of nuclear threats to induce “escalation paralysis” in Washington and other NATO capitals. As a result, the U.S. was late in delivering to Ukraine badly needed tanks, as well as air defense and artillery like HIMARS and ATACMS, in the early stages of the war. This reluctance clearly played a role in Ukraine’s inability to make significant gains in its much-vaunted counteroffensive last summer. More than two years into the fight, Ukraine’s air force still has deployed none of the F-16 fighter aircraft promised by the West.
But scaring the West is not the only point of Mr. Putin’s nuclear threats. He has at least three other objectives as well.
First, Mr. Putin wants his own population to believe Russia is in a direct fight with NATO, when in fact NATO is supporting Ukraine’s established right of self-defense. Referring to the U.S. provision of long-range ATACMS to Ukraine in March, Mr. Medvedev emphasized, “Russia regards all long-range weapons used by Ukraine as already being directly controlled by servicemen from NATO countries.”
Mr. Putin wants to frame Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine as a defensive war against a NATO that has expanded to Russia’s borders and, by extension, a defense against Western principles of democratic liberty and the rule of law, which represent an existential threat to Mr. Putin’s kleptocratic rule.
Second, Mr. Putin’s ostensible primary reason for invading was to block any sort of military or strategic partnership between Ukraine and the West, especially NATO membership. If the Kremlin can lay down a marker that any attack on Russian soil, even in self-defense against legitimate military targets, would risk nuclear war, then Mr. Putin will likely have torpedoed Ukraine’s dreams of membership in NATO, whose Article 5 requires collective defense against any outside threat.
Third, having concluded that President Biden’s overriding objective is to avoid the nuclear escalation Mr. Putin brazenly threatens, the Kremlin is brandishing its nuclear arsenal to deter the West from allowing Ukraine to strike military targets in Russia. The White House went through an excruciating level of micromanaging just to authorize Ukrainian forces to conduct attacks over the border to keep Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, from falling into Russian hands.
The State Department should be wielding America’s considerable soft power around the globe to own the narrative about Mr. Putin’s impetuous nuclear threats, threats that are extraordinarily irresponsible and reflect his increasing weakness in the face of a war that has cost his country dearly.
To be clear: Of course Ukraine should be able to strike legitimate military targets inside Russia. The range of the armaments NATO has provided has been highly limited and too slow to arrive. If Mr. Putin does not like Ukraine’s bombs targeting his military sites, then he should halt his bloody invasion and stop raining down hell on Ukrainian civilians with indiscriminate Russian munitions, Iranian drones and North Korean artillery shells.
Meanwhile, Mr. Putin, the former KGB spy, should appreciate that his own national security advisers are likely nervous that his effort to make the U.S. fear the prospect of nuclear conflict is greater than at any time since the Cuban missile crisis could indeed result in a disastrous miscalculation.
And that could be some added ideological motivation for disaffected Kremlin insiders to spill Mr. Putin’s secrets to the U.S. intelligence community.
• Daniel N. Hoffman is a retired clandestine services officer and former chief of station with the Central Intelligence Agency. His combined 30 years of government service included high-level overseas and domestic positions at the CIA. He has been a Fox News contributor since May 2018. Follow him on X @DanielHoffmanDC.
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