Has Russia's nuclear saber-rattling lost its edge?

Russia has kept the world from intervening more directly in its war with Ukraine with a simple, hair-raising reminder: It has nuclear weapons. And it is willing to use them if its interests are sufficiently threatened by the West.

It isn't clear the West feels those threats as keenly as it once did. And in the Kremlin, there is recognition that its use of nuclear saber-rattling is "starting to lose its potency," said The Washington Post. Why? Because the United States and other Ukraine allies have repeatedly pushed against Russia's "red lines" — by providing jet fighters to Kyiv, for example — apparently without heightening the risk of a nuclear war. "There is already immunity to such statements," said an anonymous Russian official, "and they don't frighten anyone."

But Vladimir Putin is still making those threats. He warned NATO allies this month that they would be "at war with Russia" if they provide Ukraine with long-range missiles. The threat "sounds different this time," Fred Weir said at The Christian Science Monitor. Putin has come under pressure from Moscow hawks to "restore deterrence" and make Western leaders more cautious about their support for Ukraine. "There is a growing feeling that the West needs some kind of a wake-up call," said Russian newspaper columnist Sergei Strokan. 

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

What did the commentators say?

It's time for the West to "change the way we think about nuclear deterrence," Andriy Zagorodnyuk said at The Guardian. The United States and Europe have proceeded cautiously, worried about "potential nuclear escalation" and triggering a world war. That means the strategy against Russia has prioritized "avoiding escalation, even if this slows down Ukraine's defense efforts." After two years of war, though, a number of experts believe the chances of nuclear war "are practically zero," Zagorodnyuk said. Why? Because the world has been able to "silence Putin's nuclear saber-rattling."

"There should have been a nuclear war by now," Phillips P. O'Brien said at The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. Despite an incursion into Russian territory, Putin's forces have "not taken any step to even prepare nuclear weapons for use." That's something to celebrate. But it's not time to abandon caution: "The longer a war goes on, the more politically intense and brutal it gets." That makes nuclear escalation "more likely," O'Brien said. One certainty: The world is in uncharted territory. "Many of the assumptions underlying the use of nuclear weapons lie in tatters."

What next?

One snag: A planned test of the country's so-called "Satan II" intercontinental ballistic missile evidently "failed" in late September, said CBS News. Satellite imagery shows a "large crater and remnants of a possible explosion" at the test site in northern Russia. 

Putin, meanwhile, is ramping up the rhetoric. On Wednesday he announced that Russia would "adjust its nuclear doctrine," said The New York Times. Russian forces will now be prepared to use nuclear weapons to repel a conventional-weapons attack that is a "critical threat to our sovereignty," Putin said. That's a "clear reference" to Ukraine's recent cross-border incursion into Russian territory. He signaled, too, that Russia will hold Ukraine's backers as responsible for those incursions as well. Putin's statement "lowers the rhetorical threshold for potential use of nuclear weapons," said one analyst to the Times. The nuclear saber-rattling isn't over.