Several experts – including a retired U.S. Brigadier General – caution that nuclear weapons have been ‘normalized’ in the Russian discourse
Amos Harel, May 26, 2023
Despite a specific territorial success that Russia recorded this week in the war in Ukraine, capturing the city of Bakhmut after its total destruction, the overall picture remains utterly gloomy for Moscow. The Kremlin’s vaunted spring offensive has so far failed to materialize, and Ukraine continues to display extremely impressive stamina. Kyiv’s achievements are encouraging, for the time being, the continued military support by the West. This week, the United States and NATO announced their intention to supply Ukraine with F-16 warplanes for the first time.
According to most indications, the war is going to continue for some considerable time and cause much bloodletting on both sides. At the same time, the assessments are that the greater Russian President Vladimir Putin’s frustration becomes, the more likely he is to resort to extreme measures. That is the background to the renewal of the discussion of the nightmare scenario that Putin is liable to use nuclear weapons against Ukraine.
Writing in the Washington Post last week, journalist Anna Nemtsova noted that never in more than two decades of covering the Putin regime has she seen the Kremlin so “rattled” and so insecure about its might. She listed a series of events that have undermined Moscow’s self-confidence: a mysterious drone attack on the Kremlin, an attempted car-bomb assassination of a leading advocate of stepping up the war in Ukraine, and the downing of four Russian military aircraft inside Russia in a single day.
In contrast to the past, Nemtsova writes, this time there is no need for hints or “cryptic messages” to understand the frame of mind in Moscow. In this war, most of the grim details are made public quickly thanks to the frequent statements by Yevgeniy Prigozhin, the head of the Wagner Group militia and a Putin loyalist. Prigozhin recently photographed himself standing next to the bodies of soldiers in battle as he cursed the military’s leadership, claiming it had abandoned them to die in Ukraine. He demanded that Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov be placed on trial on a charge of being responsible for the death and wounding of tens of thousands of his militiamen in the fighting.
According to Nemtsova, part of the failure in the war must be attributed to the regime’s corruption and dysfunction, but the Russian loss has been exacerbated by the effect of Ukrainian drone attacks, for which Kyiv does not claim responsibility. She attributes importance to the annual parade in Moscow to mark victory over Nazi Germany at the beginning of the month, in which only one tank was on display. No one understands Putin’s victory plan, she writes, and there is a feeling of “chaos and disarray” at the highest levels of government.
The Israeli expert Prof. Dmitry Adamsky, from Reichman University, this week published an article in the magazine Foreign Affairs in which he again sets forth the scenario he put forward more than a year ago, at the start of the war, regarding the possible use of nuclear weapons. Russia, he reminds readers, still possesses the world’s largest nuclear arsenal. Its nuclear command is in the best state of maintenance of the Russian security forces and has at its disposal thousands of nuclear missiles capable of obliterating cities, along with thousands of tactical weapons for battlefield use.
According to Adamsky, Putin endorses “nuclear orthodoxy,” with the two pillars or the Russian state being nuclear might and the traditional values. Already at the time of the invasion of Ukraine, he recalls, there was an element of nuclear threat in Russia’s moves. A short time before the invasion, the Russian security forces held an exercise in which they tested their nuclear systems. Subsequently, frequent threats were voiced about the use of nuclear weapons if the West were to cross red lines in its approach to the war in Ukraine. The West believed Russia was bluffing, but was careful not to get overly involved.
In the past year-plus, Adamsky avers, there was another development that does not augur well. He discerns a normalization of nuclear weapons in the strategic discourse and among the public. Russian generals, politicians and experts are talking a great deal about employing strategic deterrence forces, are making structural changes in the nuclear command system and are expanding the possible operational options.
Adamsky reports that Russian generals who are engaged in the nuclear realm have been writing extensively on the subject. The joint idea they express frequently refers to upgrading deterrence against the background of Russia’s weakness as manifested in the war, in the hope that the time that will pass will be exploited to rehabilitate the conventional forces. He relates that a rock singer who is close to the Kremlin recently recorded a hymn to Russia’s advanced ballistic missiles, with the accompanying music played by the military orchestra of the Strategic Nuclear Missile Forces. As usual, priests are also much occupied with the subject, as part of the effort to cultivate an image of Russia as a crazy state whose moves are unpredictable, creating a deterrent effect.
The Israeli expert thinks that the experts in the West are too tranquil in their assessment of the nuclear dangers in the present war. Nuclear weapons are now part of the new normal in Russia, he writes, and therefore the chances have grown that in the event of a deterioration their use will be considered.
A similar and even more pungent spirit pervades an article published by a retired American brigadier general, Kevin Ryan, a former U.S. military attaché in Moscow, on the website of Harvard University’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. According to Ryan, the Russians have exhausted their response capability in the face of an escalation in Ukrainian offensive activity, which he expects soon. Some 300,000 new troops were thrown into the Ukraine campaign recently, but did not affect the direction of the war’s development. T-55 tanks manufactured in the 1950s were seen near the combat zones, reflecting the dimensions of Russia’s loss of matériel.
As Ryan sees it, Putin is preparing the ground for the use of tactical nuclear weapons, is removing barriers in decision-making and is readying justifications for that action. The trigger in this case could be the army’s inability to escalate as the president demands, causing the government to fear that it will lose the Crimean Peninsula or the districts close to it. Nuclear weapons, he writes, are liable to be Putin’s only way out in the event of an escalation. Accordingly, he is cultivating an allegation that this is an existential threat to Russia. The United States and NATO have already declared that they will not use nuclear weapons in the conflict, thus potentially leaving Kyiv exposed.
Ryan, too, notes that the Western experts tend to think that the prospect of nuclear arms being used in the confrontation is low and that the problem is serious but not urgent. That is a mistake, he writes. The problem is in fact urgent and Putin is about to resort to nuclear weapons. The retired general quotes high-ranking American figures who played down the importance of this scenario in Congressional hearings, but disagrees with them. Putin, he avers, has been preparing for this possibility from an early stage of the war which went awry. When he announced the annexation to Russia of four captured districts in Ukraine, he said that if the territorial integrity of his country were to come under threat, he would use all the means at his disposal to defend it.
Putin is under growing pressure from the nationalist direction to show results, Ryan writes, in the light of the disappointment at the army’s failure. In his view, the United States needs to prepare the possible responses to a new world order in which the nuclear genie has been let out of the bottle. Not to abandon Ukraine, to get ready for change.