OPINION: Putin’s nuclear threat is a magic trick, but a dangerous one

The key to all magic tricks is distraction, which is the best way to understand Russian President Vladimir Putin’s latest round of nuclear saber rattling, including Thursday’s use of a new generation missile to hit a target in Ukraine.

After an initial statement by Ukraine’s air force that Russia had fired an intercontinental ballistic missile, or ICBM, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin later said in a televised address to his nation that the strike had in fact tested a new, shorter range, hypersonic one called an Oreshnik. These are primarily designed to carry multiple nuclear warheads and would require missile defense systems Ukraine doesn’t possess to shoot down.

Fired from from the Astrakhan region, at the northern tip of the Caspian Sea, the missile struck a factory and surrounding buildings in the Ukrainian city of Dnipro, about 620 miles away.

Putin made clear in his address that this was a response to the American and British decisions to let Ukraine use the short-range ATACMS ballistic missiles and Storm Shadow cruise missiles against targets in Russia. Yet the choice of weapon was also an attempt to give credibility to his currently threadbare nuclear threats.

Russia has very few of these very expensive missiles and will not gut its nuclear deterrent by using a lot of them in Ukraine. So whatever the damaged caused — and according to initial reports it was little greater than is caused by other ballistic missiles Russia routinely uses — Thursday’s strike is less a harbinger of Oreshnik attacks to come than an attempt to convince European capitals and Washington that Putin really means it this time when he says he’s willing to turn this war into a nuclear conflict.

But it’s essential to retain perspective. We are not on the cusp of a nuclear conflagration. Putin talks up his massive nuclear arsenal because it has proved extraordinarily successful in getting the Biden administration and leaders in Europe to self-censor and slow-walk their aid to Ukraine. If he can now get Trump to frame peace talks as a question of whether Americans and Europeans would like: a) to avoid World War III and a nuclear Armageddon, or b) go on supporting Ukraine until it gets a sustainable deal, they will surely pick option A.

So, what conclusions to draw from all this? One is to stop fibrillating every time Putin talks about nuclear weapons. The amended public doctrine on nuclear usage that he signed this past week was another signaling tool rather than an operational one, and removes none of the immense hurdles and costs involved in actually pushing the red button. It’s notable that Russia informed the U.S. of Thursday’s strike in advance. The calculations around didn’t add up when Russia was losing in Ukraine in 2022; they make less sense now when it’s winning and a more amenable U.S. president is about to take office. Thursday’s use of an experimental missile doesn’t change that.

If the nuclear noise is a distraction, Putin is with his other hand escalating the war in very concrete ways. That included deploying the North Korean troops and mid-range ballistic missiles that triggered Washington’s change of heart on ATACMS. Last Monday, undersea cables connecting Sweden and Finland to Lithuania and Germany, respectively, were disrupted. Investigations are underway, but the base case must for now be Russian sabotage. Unlike the 2022 Nord Stream natural gas pipeline attack, it is hard to see who else would have motive.

In the meantime, Israel has been surprised by the quantity, sophistication and recent date of manufacture of Russian weapons they’ve been finding in Hezbollah arms caches in Lebanon. In Yemen, Moscow reportedly provided targeting data to help Houthi rebels hit commercial shipping in the Red Sea. According to reports in the Wall Street Journal and Reuters among others, the Kremlin also considered an Iranian-brokered deal to give the Houthis anti-ship missiles that might have threatened US warships. That didn’t happen at the time, but Putin has said very clearly that if Ukraine’s allies allowed it to use their cruise and ballistic missiles to hit Russia, he’d give enemies of the West the means to do the same. There’s no reason to doubt him.

Expect more of this, in particular attacks on undersea cables. Simple geography means that Russia, with a landmass that stretches from the Baltic Sea to the Pacific Ocean, doesn’t have or need a lot of them, while the West does. That creates an asymmetry of vulnerability that Russia, with one of the most capable fleets of deep-diving submarines that can reach other nations’ cables, is well placed to exploit.

Any conflict that distracts from Putin’s invasion, or draws down U.S. military and financial resources such that these can’t be sent to Ukraine, works to his benefit. So he’s doing what he can, where he can, to create chaos and strain. Some of this is retaliatory, but mostly it’s part of his wider war effort and would be unlikely to end after a ceasefire in Ukraine. Putin has made no secret that his ultimate goal is to restore Russia to the international top table as a great power.

Yet the sudden reversal of U.S. policy on ATACMS has alarmed him and does indeed make things more dangerous. The prospect that the next U.S. president will try to force a quick end to the war makes it vital for both sides to ensure they’re in as strong a position as possible when the music stops. If Putin’s forces are no longer driving forward because Ukrainian drones, U.S. ATACMS and British Storm Shadow cruise missiles are destroying Russian ammunition depots and energy infrastructure, he will be in a much weaker position to treat ceasefire negotiations as a venue to demand Kyiv’s surrender.

This is the bottom line. Putin is trying to claw back Russia’s territorial sway; he’s as reluctant to give up the power that comes with empire as were the British, French, Austrians and Ottomans before him. I don’t hear anybody suggesting the world would be a better place with Algeria still a French colony, or Hungary still ruled from Vienna. If those empires had been able to threaten the world if they didn’t get their way, you can be sure they would have. Yet none of this means Putin is ready to invite the radical risks and certain costs of a nuclear strike.

Marc Champion is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering Europe, Russia and the Middle East. He was previously Istanbul bureau chief for the Wall Street Journal. This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

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