| As famed whistleblower and anti-nuclear activist Daniel Ellsberg recently put it, even if a nuclear weapon hasn’t actually been detonated in the war in Ukraine, they have been used: “They’re being used as threats, just as a bank robber uses a gun, even if he doesn’t pull the trigger.”
The threat has loomed over this conflict since the very beginning, when Russian President Vladimir Putin threatened any outside countries that might interfere with Russian designs on Ukraine with “such consequences that you have never experienced in your history.” Putin, his top officials and the Russian state media’s propagandists have repeated those threats many times, but they’ve started to seem a bit less credible as the level of Western military support has increased, blowing through Putin’s supposed red lines without any nuclear retaliation. And in recent months, the Kremlin has seemed to be dialing back its nuclear rhetoric.
Until this past week that is.
On Saturday, Putin announced plans to station Russian nuclear weapons in neighboring Belarus. Most nuclear analysts are skeptical that facilities in Belarus will actually be ready to host these nukes by July, as Putin vowed, but it’s still a sign of a return to nuclear brinkmanship from the Kremlin. That approach was only underlined on Monday when Nikolai Patrushev, a close Putin ally and secretary of his security council, warned in a newspaper interview that Russia “has modern unique weapons capable of destroying any adversary, including the United States, in the event of a threat to its existence.”
The ostensible reason for Putin’s Belarus move was Britain’s recent decision to provide Ukraine with armor-piercing rounds containing depleted uranium. But this latest round of nuclear saber-rattling was met mainly with shrugs in both London and Washington. But is it possible the message Putin was sending was intended less for his adversaries to the West and more of his allies to the East?
While Chinese leader Xi Jinping has generally refrained from criticizing Russia’s conduct of the war and supported Putin’s argument that NATO provoked the conflict, the one exception has been nuclear weapons. The closest that Xi has come to criticizing Russia since the war began was his statement last November calling on the international community to “jointly oppose the use of, or threats to use, nuclear weapons.”
Just last week, when Xi met with Putin in Moscow, the joint communiqué put out by the two leaders specifically included language stating that “all nuclear-weapon states should refrain from deploying nuclear weapons abroad and withdraw nuclear weapons deployed abroad.” In other words, by placing Russian nukes in Belarus, Putin is violating a commitment he made to his most important ally just a week earlier. Instead, as he has so many times in the past, Putin gave himself permission by accusing the West of hypocrisy, saying that by placing nukes on the territory of its allies, Russia is simply doing what the U.S. has been “doing for decades.”
While the Putin-Xi summit was a political win for the Kremlin in purely political terms, especially coming shortly after the Russian president’s indictment for war crimes by the International Criminal Court, it also came with few specific deliverables. Xi did not sign off, as Putin was clearly hoping he would, on a proposed pipeline project to reroute Russia’s gas exports from Europe to Asia. And despite warnings from the U.S. intelligence services that China is considering providing arms and ammunition to Russia—a move that would be a genuine game-changer in what’s become a grinding war of attrition—there were no announcements on direct military support.
Writing on Substack, former U.S. ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul posited a theory that the Russian’s deliberately flouted the commitments they made to Xi: “Maybe Putin was so disappointed with the lack of gifts that Xi brought to Moscow…that he wanted to get back at Xi with the only power card he holds in his hand: nuclear weapons.”
The Chinese foreign ministry’s response to the move was fairly ambiguous, with spokesperson Mao Ning referring to an agreement made by nuclear weapons states last year affirming that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.”
We’ll see in the coming weeks, particularly if and when Ukraine’s armed forces launch a long-anticipated counteroffensive, whether Putin will return to the full-on nuclear saber-rattling that characterized his rhetoric in the early months of the war. For now, this talk doesn’t seem to raise as much alarm as it used to in Western capitals. But as the war continues, particularly if Russia appears to be losing badly, Ukraine’s allies may have to make some tough decisions about how much they think Putin really means it.
— Global Security Reporter Joshua Keating and China Reporter Lili Pike |
