We must take Putin’s nuclear threat more seriously

In the Kremlin’s warped worldview, Russia is now at war with Nato. Forced to choose between defeat and escalation, it may do the unthinkable

If there is nuclear war, “we’ll go to heaven, they [the West] will simply croak”. That Margarita Simonyan, head of Russia’s disinformation network, RT, should make jokes about nuclear annihilation over teatime telly reveals much of the militaristic sickness among Russia’s elites.

The influential Simonyan is no outlier. Her words consciously echoed Putin’s own in 2019 when, responding to a question about nuclear war, he said: “We will go to heaven as martyrs, they will simply croak because they won’t even have time to repent.”

Putin himself has long wielded the spectre of Russia’s nuclear arsenal with messianic abandon. It is clearly a source of deep pride that Russia’s nuclear stockpile is once again the world’s largest, lovingly restored to the size and stature of its Soviet heyday.

This is more than can be said about Russia’s post-Soviet politicians. In the Cold War era, politicians on both sides were more circumspect about flaunting weapons of mass destruction, more cognisant of the horrors they entailed. Soviet and US leaders signed several important arms control agreements, including the forerunner to today’s New START treaty. Thanks to this treaty, the Russians pre-warned the Americans they were testlaunching their new RS-28 Sarmat missile, avoiding escalating an already tense atmosphere.

This network of agreements and precedence is reassuring, until you remember that Russia is not the Soviet Union, this type of arms control is under intense pressure, and Russia’s war on Ukraine is fuelled by deeply irrational thinking. Having invaded armed with mythology rather than analysis, the army failed to achieve its objectives, and Russian elites are now blaming all and sundry for the results, singling out ever more preposterous enemies, from Nato, to a US Congress-sponsored team of homosexuals, to satanists.

Numerous Russian politicians have made it clear they see Ukraine as a proxy war with Nato, partly to distract from the military performance but partly because they believe this. The notion of Russia as being at war with the West permeated the 2021 National Security Strategy and recent commentary by Nikolai Patrushev, one of Putin’s closest advisors.

Putin has threatened the West with a “lightning-quick response” should it go much further in helping Ukraine, leaving strategic ambiguity as to what exactly he meant. His readiness to embrace, even rhetorically, mass death reflects in part a societal preoccupation with war heroism but it is also a marker of existential angst.

In this view, the Western threat is existential not only for Russia but also for Putin – if the Russian president cares to make the distinction. Putin is said to be haunted by the brutal death of Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi. He is most likely aware that personalised autocracies of the type he has created rarely transition peacefully. Faced with shameful defeat or regime change, Putin may well feel sufficiently (personally) threatened to launch a nuclear weapon.

The vision of nuclear annihilation might lead us to try to reason and reconcile the Russian elites’ aims and language with our own paradigms and frameworks. But the Russian perception is no longer decipherable through cost-risk analysis alone.

There are some measures that might be prudent – alongside strong support for Ukraine, Western countries should be clear they are not pursuing regime change in Russia and find ways to keep appropriate channels open.

This is why Western leaders must include the unthinkable in their calculations. If the Salisbury poisonings, political assassinations and invasion of Ukraine have proven anything, it is the recklessness of boldly stating: “Putin would never…” Rationalisation will not protect us from the irrational.