Opinion | Putin Keeps Threatening to Use Nuclear Weapons. Would He?

Last week, President Vladimir Putin announced a plan to change Russia’s nuclear doctrine. He said Russia would be prepared to use a nuclear weapon in response to an attack with conventional weapons that creates a “critical threat to our sovereignty” and would treat “aggression against Russia by any nonnuclear state, but with the participation or support of a nuclear state,” as a “joint attack on the Russian Federation.”

This is the key change, and it’s not subtle. Nor is it meant to be. Its purpose is to influence Washington on the specific question of whether to grant Ukraine’s request to use American weapons systems against targets inside Russia, and more generally to persuade Western leaders to take Mr. Putin’s threats more seriously. His problem is that he is unable to describe situations, however belligerent his rhetoric, in which using nuclear weapons would make sense.

Since Russia annexed Crimea, in 2014, Mr. Putin has been signaling to NATO countries that they risk nuclear war if they interfere on the side of Ukraine. Whether in the form of blustery propaganda, somber announcements or drills, these signals have consistently been designed to exude menace without ever quite committing to nuclear use.

When Mr. Putin announced the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, he warned that those standing “in our way” must know “that Russia will respond immediately, and the consequences will be such as you have never seen in your entire history.” In September 2022 (when U.S. officials were particularly worried about nuclear escalation) he said, “If the territorial integrity of our country is threatened, we will certainly use all the means at our disposal to protect Russia and our people. This is not a bluff.”

On Sept. 13, he said that if NATO countries enable Ukraine to use long-range “precision weapons” to hit targets inside Russia, they would be “at war with Russia.” As a consequence, he said, “bearing in mind the change in the essence of the conflict, we will make appropriate decisions in response to the threats that will be posed to us.” We are left to infer what he means by “appropriate.”

Each of these statements at different times was designed to deter NATO countries from certain actions — Sweden and Finland joining NATO, the West supplying weapons to Ukraine — without committing to any specific course of action if those actions went ahead. But as we know, Sweden and Finland joined NATO, and Europe and the United States have supplied rocket launchers, tanks, F-16 fighter jets and long-range missiles to Ukraine. There was no nuclear response.

Why is that? None of the actions above warranted such drastic escalation. Any kind of nuclear use would raise what is still supposed to be a limited “special military operation,” in Ukraine, to a new, exceptionally dangerous level. Striking NATO countries or other countries with nuclear weapons would risk retaliation in kind against Russia (a point that is not likely to be lost on the populations of Moscow and St. Petersburg). Confining use to so-called tactical nuclear weapons, which have smaller warheads and are designed for battlefield use, against Ukraine’s frontline forces could prompt a direct NATO intervention, if only with conventional forces (Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser, warned in September 2022 of “catastrophic consequences”).

Any nuclear use would lead to international outrage, some of which Mr. Putin might feel able to ignore, but less so if it came from otherwise friendly states such as India and China. He could try to limit that outrage by using just enough weapons to show he was prepared to cross the threshold — and could go further. But that could be embarrassing if the weapons turned out to be duds — many have not been tested for some time — or the delivery vehicles were shot down by Ukrainian air defenses.

Given all this, how should one understand the current “red line” and the presumed reason for the changes to Russia’s nuclear doctrine? If the United States and Europe allowed Ukraine to strike targets deep inside Russia with weapons supplied by the West, would that be a serious enough escalation to justify nuclear use, from Mr. Putin’s perspective?

If Mr. Putin really believes, as he claims, that Ukraine can operate precise Western weapons systems only with Western support, then that has already happened: Western precision-guided weapons have already been used against Russian targets on Ukrainian territory, including in the Crimean peninsula. If the problem is hitting targets inside Russia, then Ukraine has been doing that for some time with its homemade systems — and with increasing effectiveness. Ukraine even mounted a conventional invasion of Russia in August, in Kursk, from where it has yet to be ejected. (In fact, rather than sound the alarm, Mr. Putin played this incursion down because the very fact of it was embarrassing.)

There is very little about the current debate that is new. That is not to dismiss Mr. Putin’s threats as pure hot air and bluff but to recognize that nuclear use, while undoubtedly the most dangerous option, is not the most likely. It is not that he is averse to escalation; he has already escalated — from the full-scale invasion to ordering the annexation of sovereign territory, attacking energy infrastructure and bombarding civilian areas. He has sought to punish the West through energy crunches, campaigns of sabotage and subversion, and by stirring up trouble around the world. President Biden has still not agreed to Ukrainian requests to use Western missiles against targets inside Russia. This is partly because U.S. intelligence believes it would be a poor use of scarce resources, but also because of concerns about these other, nonnuclear forms of escalation.

Nor does this mean that there are no circumstances in which Mr. Putin might consider using nuclear weapons. The scenario he has mentioned most is one in which NATO forces are fighting alongside Ukrainian forces, a situation that could quickly put Russian forces on the back foot. That is a scenario in which we can imagine a desperate Mr. Putin being prepared to embark on a wider war. He finds himself caught in the classic paradox of the nuclear age. He does not consider himself irrational, but to make his threats credible, he has to rely on his adversaries’ thinking that he might be a bit crazy.

Lawrence Freedman is an emeritus professor of war studies at King’s College London and the author, most recently, of “Command: The Politics of Military Operations From Korea to Ukraine.” He co-writes the Substack “Comment Is Freed.”

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