OPINION: Vladimir Putin’s Latest Nuclear Tantrum

Russian President Vladimir Putin is once again clinging to his nuclear teddy bear. On Wednesday, he unleashed his latest hollow Armageddon threat to use nukes in an attempt to bully his way to a win in Ukraine.

Putin expanded Russia’s nuclear policy to now include use of nuclear weapons against non-nuclear states who use conventional weapons provided by nuclear powers such as the United States and the United Kingdom to attack the Russian motherland.

Translation: Putin is scared of the UK’s Storm Shadow missiles – and fears their use by Ukraine might bring about a decisive end to his now not so special “special military operation” in the Donbas and Crimea.

The Kremlin is counting on British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer to cower in the face of Putin’s latest nuclear blustering. Ditto France’s President Emmanuel Macron – and US President Joe Biden.

It may be working in Washington.

Not so much in France. In February 2022 then French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian told reporters, “I think that Vladimir Putin must also understand that the Atlantic alliance is a nuclear alliance. That is all I will say about this.” The Cold War deterrence strategy of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) is very much alive and well.

Biden appears poised to approve the use of Storm Shadows and Scalp Missiles – their French twin – inside of Russia. Starmer is pressing for just that as he meets with Biden at the 79th United Nations General Assembly in New York City.

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Yet for now, Biden is keeping US-made ATACMS off the table. On Tuesday, returning to the White House, Biden said no decision on use of ATACMS to conduct deep precision strikes inside of Russia had yet been made.

Talk about leaving your NATO allies exposed.

Putin, sensing an opening has unleashed his state-controlled propagandists and once again Russian airways are filled with talking heads such as Vladimir Solovyov spinning fantasies of nuking London, Brussels, Paris and presumably everything in between.

Fortunately for the UK, Downing Street has been down this make-believe road before. Olga Skabeyeva, widely known as “Putin’s Doll,” suggested nuking the late Queen Elizabeth II’s funeral while global leaders were in attendance.

Putin, despite his incessant nuclear tantrums, is not going to nuke the West. People need to read the room. As of early August, Gazprom, a Russian oil and gas company, had piped via Ukrainian pipelines 91.5 million cubic meters of natural gas to Europe – and as of September the European Union is still importing Russian oil.

Simply put, Putin needs oil and gas revenue to prop up his economy and pay for the skyrocketing cost of his military blunders in Ukraine. Nuking Europe would be self-defeating – and it would most certainly result in an immediate NATO nuclear response.

That, and the capability of his nuclear forces lost a bit of its luster on Sept. 2, when a Russian RS-28 Sarmat intercontinental ballistic missile test launch – timed to demonstrate Russian nuclear capability – suffered a “catastrophic failure” on the launch pad at Russia’s Plesetsk test site.

As such, Putin knows his war against Ukraine will be won or lost conventionally on the battlefields in Ukraine, and deeper and deeper inside of Mother Russia if Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and his generals keep pressing their brilliant counteroffensive in the Kursk Oblast in southwestern Russia – and one that the Kremlin still cannot stop.

Putin knows both he and Zelensky are at a critical inflection point in the war. Russia is saddled with an outdated army incapable of maneuver or combined warfare – and weighted down even more by an incompetent general staff as exemplified by the hapless Gen. Valery Gerasimov who somehow remains in charge.

Moscow’s only conventional strength is fighting a static war of attrition as evidenced to date in Bakhmut, Vuhledar – and most recently in their bloody incremental movements toward Pokrovsk, a key Ukrainian rail and coal mining town 56 kilometers north of Donetsk. Russian mass in infantry and artillery against static fixed targets – human ‘meat assaults’ that feed the Ukraine meat grinder.

Getting there has been costly. As Putin’s forces advance in the Donbas, he is suffering upwards of 1,000 casualties per day; 70,000 Russian soldiers have been killed or wounded alone between May and June of this year – and 645,150 since the war began in February 2022.

For now, Putin’s advantage in artillery fires has accounted for most of his gains in the Donbas. By some estimates, Russia is firing 10,000 artillery shells a day compared to 2,000 by the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU).

Moscow is out-producing NATO by delivering 3 million artillery shells to the battlefield compared to 1.2 million – and that advantage is fueling Putin’s marginal, yet nonetheless growing, gains in eastern Ukraine. The Arsenals of Evil, including Iran and North Korea, are now beating the one time Arsenals of Democracy in Washington and London.

Interdicting Russian artillery, troop formations, drone and glide bomb launch sites deep inside of Russia therefore is essential for Zelensky if Ukraine is to win the war. ATACMS, Storm Shadows, Scalps and ideally Germany’s Taurus missiles can do just that if Washington and Brussels will drop their baseless escalation fears and paralysis.

Putin knows that it is likely game over if that happens – and thus he is playing the nuclear card yet again while Zelensky is in the US lobbying Biden for the West’s long-range precision strike weapons to be allowed to attack military targets in Russia posing a “clear and imminent threat” to the AFU and civilian population centers. Specifically, Russian drone launch sites, air bases such as Engels-2, and Tupolev Tu-95 “Bear” bombers firing Kh-101 cruise missiles at military and civilian targets across Ukraine.

Biden’s unwillingness to take the lead on green-lighting deep precision strike weapons makes it imperative for Starmer and Macron to make a bold stand for European democracy – and authorize Ukraine to use Storm Shadows and Scalp Missiles inside of Russia on military targets without any restrictions or limitations.

Lady Liberty’s torch right now is flickering – and the Old World needs to remind the New World of its global responsibilities to safeguard democracy. Starmer and Macron have it in their power to do just that.

If not, Ukraine’s purgatory will continue – and Kyiv will be at risk in the long run of losing a war of attrition to Putin. If Zelensky and his generals lose, then eastern Europe will soon find itself under the specter of an emboldened Russian Federation.

Or, even just as ominously, NATO might find itself at war as New NATO states including Poland, Romania and the Baltic States of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania refuse to accept Russian victory as a fait accompli and enter the war on Ukraine’s side. Warsaw, Bucharest, Tallinn, Riga and Vilnius all know – and fear – what it is like to live under the Russian boot – and out of a sense of self-preservation they are unlikely to willingly do so again.

This war already has its Winston Churchill in the form of Zelensky. What it needs is its Franklin Roosevelt. Biden, thus far, is shying away from being FDR. Can and will Starmer and/or Macron rise to the challenge?

Nothing in NATO’s Charter precludes them from doing so on a bilateral basis – and Europe’s future depends on it, Putin’s nuclear bluffing notwithstanding.

Copyright 2024. Mark C. Toth and Jonathan E. Sweet. All rights reserved.

The views expressed in this opinion article are the author’s and not necessarily those of Kyiv Post. 

Mark Toth writes on national security and foreign policy. Col. (Ret.) Jonathan Sweet served 30 years as an Army military intelligence officer.