Why Putin’s nuclear threats aren’t working anymore

When did Ukraine’s allies stop being scared of Russia’s nuclear weapons?

At this week’s summit in Turkey, NATO leaders strongly backed Ukraine’s growing campaign of strikes deep into Russian territory, primarily targeted at that country’s energy infrastructure, meant to bring the costs of war home to Russian citizens and compel their government to stop the invasion. On one night this week, Ukraine launched more than 400 drones into Russia.

There was a time, not so long ago, when the prospect of strikes inside the borders of the world’s biggest nuclear power would provoke warnings from the Kremlin about the catastrophic consequences of crossing Russia’s “red lines,” along with hand-wringing from the US about the prospect of nuclear escalation. The prospect of direct combat between two nuclear powers was the reason the US resisted international calls to impose a “no-fly zone” over Ukraine back in 2022; made the Biden administration reluctant to provide long-range capabilities like HIMARS rockets, ATACMs missiles, and F-16 fighter jets to Ukraine; and then, after finally providing them, restricted their use to Ukrainian territory.

But now, as one western official put it to the Financial Times, the sheer frequency of Russia’s past nuclear threats during the conflict have “devalued the currency.” Putin has been making notably fewer of these threats recently, even the attacks inside Russia have accelerated. Russia’s “red lines” are now being crossed with stunning regularity. Ukrainian drones regularly strike not just military or industrial targets but cities including Moscow.

And since last year, the US has not only gotten out of the way but has been providing intelligence to facilitate this campaign. In Crimea, annexed by Russia in 2014, a campaign targeting key bridges and rail links has led to food and fuel shortages. On the battlefield itself, the grinding offensive has been thrown into reverse; the Russians lost roughly 400 square miles of territory in April and May.

Russia has hardly given up, continuing to pound Ukrainian cities, including Kyiv, with missiles and drones. But the fears of nuclear escalation seem to have notably diminished.

“We repeatedly oversell the risk of escalation,” said Maria Snegovaya, a prominent Russian political analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, at a panel discussion in Washington this week hosted by the Washington-based think tank the Quincy Institute. “During the Biden administration, many said that if Ukraine strikes deep into Russia’s territory, Russia will escalate,” Snegovaya said. “Ukraine now strikes into Siberia, over 2,500 kilometers deep into Russia, and we don’t see that escalation.”

But does that mean Russia’s leader was always bluffing, or, as a war he refuses to stop seems to turn against him, is there still a risk of Putin reaching for the launch codes out of desperation?

There are a few potential reasons why Russia hasn’t acted on its nuclear threats. For one, detonating a nuclear weapon so close to its borders carries risk of radioactive fallout reaching Russian territory. That’s an experience Russia knows better than most countries; parts of Western Russia are still struggling with elevated radiation levels decades after the Chernobyl meltdown in what was then Soviet Ukraine.

James Acton, co-director of the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment, also notes that Ukraine and its allies have managed escalation via “salami slicing” — gradually taking more and more aggressive steps, none of which seemed sufficient on their own, to warrant a truly catastrophic response from Russia.

“If, in some hypothetical world, it would have been possible to give Ukraine on day one, everything we ended up giving them by the end of the Biden administration, that would have been really escalatory,” said Acton. The months of delay that seemed to precede every new weapons system and capability delivered to the Ukrainians understandably enraged Ukrainians — who have never taken Putin’s threats particularly seriously and have watched some of their own cities razed to the ground with conventional weapons — but it may have helped prevent a far more destructive conflict.

Then there’s the question of just what using nuclear weapons would accomplish. Much of the concern in Ukraine has focused on the possibility of Russia using so-called “tactical” nuclear weapons, smaller warheads meant to gain a military advantage on the battlefield rather than destroy an enemy city. But on Ukraine’s long, sparsely manned frontline, where much of the fighting is increasingly carried out by unmanned drones, there aren’t many obvious targets for a tactical nuke. A nuclear blast would do little beyond irradiating parts of the “new Russia” that Putin, after all, hopes to one day control.

As far back as 2023, the FT reported that, according to Russian officials, “Putin has already gamed out the possibility of using a nuclear weapon in Ukraine and has come to the conclusion that even a limited strike would do nothing to benefit Russia.”

It remains possible to imagine a scenario where Russia uses nuclear weapons for strategic purposes, rather than tactical advantage. It could threaten to detonate a nuclear weapon, or actually detonate one, in a Ukrainian city, unless Kyiv agrees to cede the rest of the territory claimed by Russia. Some experts have long argued that Russia has an unofficial “escalate to de-escelate” strategy, under which it would use nuclear arms preemptively to force its enemies to back down.

But that would be an extraordinarily risky and unprecedented move — even for Putin, who has seemingly backed down from the nuclear ledge before. At one point, in the fall of 2022, when Ukrainian forces were on the move in southern Ukraine and had a chance to break through toward Russian-annexed Crimea, US intelligence agencies believed that the possibility of Russia using its nuclear weapons was as high as 50 percent. But the US, UK, and France all warned Russia during the 2022 crisis that they would respond with military force if Russia used a nuke. They made it clear the response would be limited to conventional weapons, but there’s no guarantee it would stay that way.

The messaging didn’t only come from Russia’s adversaries. Xi Jinping warned Putin that he would lose Chinese support if he used nuclear weapons — no small thing given Russia’s increasing economic reliance on China.

Not everyone believes we’re out of the woods, however. George Beebe, director of grand strategy at the Quincy Institute, is concerned that Ukraine’s backers have become dangerously blasé about the risk of escalation. “It is profoundly threatening to Russian national security when the impression arises in the West that Russia actually has no red lines, it will never retaliate, no matter what,” he said at this week’s panel. “That’s an extraordinarily dangerous set of circumstances.”

He noted that Ukraine’s attacks on Russia’s strategic bomber fleet, as well as early warning radars — both core elements of Russia’s nuclear deterrence — raise the risks of retaliation. And, while Russia has not responded to the attacks on Crimea with nuclear force, it’s significant that Ukraine is not actually currently threatening to retake control of the territory. Given the literally religious significance with which Putin has imbued the peninsula and how central it is to his political legitimacy, he might resort to desperate measures to keep it. Back in 2022, Elon Musk was so worried about Russian nuclear retaliation over Crimea that he cut Starlink internet access to Ukrainian forces in southern Ukraine.

Even if Putin himself rattles the nuclear saber less than he did early in the war, there are still voices in Russia calling for the nuclear option. In a recent essay, Sergey Karaganov, one of Russia’s most prominent and well-connected foreign policy analysts, wrote that “the use of nuclear weapons is a great sin. But the de facto refusal to use them is an unforgivable, deadly, and criminal sin, because it paves the way for the expansion and escalation of the world war unleashed by the West.” He called for starting with nuclear tests, followed by conventional strikes on military targets in Europe, followed by escalation to the “next level”. He concludes that “a nuclear war — God forbid — can be (easily) won, especially against a crowded and morally weak Europe.”

For the moment, Putin appears to believe that, despite the extraordinary cost in lives and rubles of the ongoing war, he will eventually grind Ukraine down through sheer manpower superiority. If he feels Russia’s situation is not actually that desperate, he may not feel it’s necessary to resort to desperate measures. For one thing, it’s not clear whether Putin is receiving accurate information about how things really look on the battlefield. But if the war started worsening to the point it could not be ignored, and the chaos within Russia itself reached a level where he believed his regime was under real threat, that could change.

Notably, however, even Beebe said he is less concerned in the short term about Russian nuclear weapons use than in conventional attacks on NATO territory. This type of escalation is increasingly a concern in the Baltic countries and Poland, and while not as grave a threat as nuclear war, wouldn’t certainly pose an unprecedented test for NATO.

Former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright once nearly gave then-joint chiefs chairman Colin Powell an “aneurysm” by asking, “What’s the point of having this superb military you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?” Likewise, if it turns out that nuclear weapons are too risky for Russia to use even when its own capital is being attacked, one could ask: What’s the point of having the world’s largest nuclear arsenal?

“We’ve found out, by an absolutely terrible experiment, that nuclear weapons are pretty much unusable,” said Pavel Podvig, an expert on Russia’s nuclear forces at the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research.

That’s not to say that nuclear weapons have been a non-factor in this war. They’re a big part of the reason why the US and other Western countries didn’t send their own troops in to help Ukraine, and a big part of the reason why Russia has held off on direct attacks against NATO countries. (Unattributable acts of sabotage and other “gray zone” tactics are another matter.)

But it’s still notable that the world is currently witnessing the first protracted, high-casualty, conventional war involving a nuclear power in decades – one in which nuclear threats have been very much in play since the beginning. And yet, that power seems unwilling or unable to use its weapons. Coming at a moment of heightened concern over nuclear proliferation, this could have implications far beyond this war for what role these weapons play in 21st century warfare and foreign policy.

For one thing, nuclear weapons may not be that much of a deterrent against conventional attacks, particularly those carried out by long-range missiles or drones. (Just ask nuclear-armed Israel or Pakistan, both of which have been repeatedly attacked.) It may also turn out that just being a nuclear power doesn’t automatically give you the ability to compel or coerce non-nuclear countries if they don’t believe you’re actually willing to use them. (Recall, also, President Donald Trump’s threats in April to destroy Iran’s “whole civilization,” which has not managed to keep Tehran in line.)

The good news is that wars fought under the nuclear shadow may still be less likely to escalate to the nuclear level than we feared. The bad news is that, without that fear, we may see more of those wars. As this war demonstrates, you don’t need nuclear weapons to kill hundreds of thousands of people.