Putin's nuclear threat shows a desperate man with no options

By: Simon Jenkins / The Guardian
Translation: Telegrafi.com

In his continued attempt to invade Ukraine, Vladimir Putin is ready to use nuclear weapons. Or so Vladimir Putin is saying. The reason is that so far his conquest has been rightly won and he sees no other way forward. The prospect of such an escalation is terrifying. A line would be crossed. Nuclear armed powers, around the world, would consider this a license. It may not be the end of the world, but it may just be the beginning of the end.

For all the enthusiasm of Western politicians for humiliating Putin, it is important to note how disciplined the West's support for Kiev has been. Yes, NATO risked the bet by advancing its borders to the East, after 1991, which according to George Kennan is "the most fatal mistake of the post-Cold War era". It mocked Russia's paranoia and risked the appearance of a militant patriot, which happened in Putin's case. But, at no time has the West taken up arms against Russia, even when Russia attacked and successively "repatriated" areas of neighboring Georgia, Chechnya and even Ukraine.

Moscow's spring invasion of Ukraine was on a completely different level from the 2014 intervention in Donbas. It was so blatant and brutal that foreign military support, for Kiev, was as much humanitarian as it was strategic. But from the start, NATO did nothing to prove Moscow's lie that the West had taken up arms against Russian soil. There will be no long-range missiles, no bombers or Western troops fighting on the ground. Only through economic sanctions did the West give credibility to Putin's claim that he was attacking Russia itself.

Putin has done a lot of damage to his own nation. It portrayed the army as a Potemkin farce, and the generals as incompetent flatterers. Many of his own people, proud Russians who have long supported his bombastic vocabulary, are now openly opposed to mobilization. Polls show that a quarter to a half of Russians oppose the war. Only the spectacular trouble caused in the West by Moscow's retaliatory gas sanctions has given the Kremlin some respite. Otherwise, Putin has no options. Like many commanders who have been forced to retreat, it is tormented by the choice of escalation or abject defeat.

During the Cold War, European civilians were taught how to respond to potential thermonuclear exchange. The fear of "mutually assured destruction" was so ingrained that it seeped into great power diplomacy and created an infrastructure of back channels and accident aversion. The merest hint of danger, as during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, and the radar malfunction in 1983, brought a quick return to sanity.

There is no reason – or there should be no reason – to see the current crisis as a return to the Cold War and nuclear confrontation. The great powers are not in existential strife. Even if Putin only threatens tactical nuclear weapons. Given the weakness of his forces on the ground, it is hard to see what benefit such weapons would bring him in what is conventional infantry warfare over territory. It would be such a gesture that would surely lose support both at home and abroad – among his supposed admirers in China and India. As for a nuclear "response" from the West, it would serve no tactical purpose and would simply open the gates for escalation.

We are told that if Putin were to fall, "hardline" figures within his circle would replace him. Russia is like all regimes under sanctions. Encircled elites drive dissenters and moderates underground or into exile. They are protected by moats and are less and less vulnerable to diplomacy and economic pressure. However, all wars must come to an end. Russia in Ukraine has been going on for eight years, which has increasingly taken on the colors of a conflict represented by the West against the East. Herein lies the danger of Putin's escalation.

Western aid has enabled Ukraine to push Russian troops back to the borders of 2014. Ukraine and the West have come together to challenge a brutal and authoritarian regime and have been largely successful. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy is now jeopardizing that unity by declaring that he wants more and more Western aid to drive Russia out of all of Ukraine, including Crimea.

As long as his cause remains righteous, there must come a point when the fight to conquer all of Ukraine becomes one where a cease-fire line can be drawn, as with Russia's violations of its neighbors' sovereignty in Chechnya, Georgia, Crimea and Donbass. At some point, perhaps after a strong Ukrainian push to the east, there should be another attempt to encourage the parties to agree to a peace. Recent agreements on grain exports and prisoner exchanges show that several channels exist.

This means a new challenge. The world of compromises, plebiscites, borders and guarantees may be less dramatic than that of guns, bombs, tanks and war drums. But it must be the world of the future. It should provide for the reconstruction of Ukraine. There is no credible interest in reviving the horrors of nuclear conflict between East and West just because a Russian ruler strayed from his sanity. /Telegraph/