A balanced response to Putin’s panic and bluster

Vladimir Putin has had a very bad month. In the past few weeks, a fierce wave of counterattacks by Ukrainian forces has recaptured significant territory from the Russian invaders, inflicted devastating losses on the Russian military, and changed the landscape of the war.

Putin’s desperate gambit to mobilize another 300,000 reserve troops has prompted tens of thousands of Russian citizens to flee the country, while many others clamor to escape. Those Russians who have not fled are protesting instead, with demonstrations against the war breaking out in at least 38 Russian cities in the past two weeks. The popular discontent in Russia has become so pervasive that Putin even admitted to “mistakes” with the draft—which he of course blamed on lower-level officials rather than himself.

Abroad, the leaders of Putin’s two primary international supporters, China and India, both rebuked him over the Ukraine invasion at their recent summit meeting in Uzbekistan. The dissatisfaction voiced by Xi Jinping and Narendra Modi may have sounded mild to Western ears, but in the circumscribed language of diplomacy it amounted to a rhetorical gut-punch to Putin.

As Ukrainian forces recapture more territory, they also uncover more evidence of Russian atrocities. The mounting accounts of Russian barbarism makes for grim reading, including widespread torture and rape, murders of women and children, and massacres of Ukrainian civilians and prisoners of war. It also further catalogs the litany of Putin’s evil.

While Russia’s recent setbacks are an earned triumph for the Ukrainians, they also raise an ominous new concern. A weak, cornered, and humiliated Putin can be a dangerous Putin. He reminded the world as much last week when he threatened, “If Russia feels its territorial integrity is threatened, we will use all defense methods at our disposal, and this is not a bluff.” Russian official Dmitry Medvedev repeated this threat, specifying the use of tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine: “American and European demagogues aren’t going to die in a nuclear apocalypse, and so they will swallow the use of any weapons in the current conflict.”

On the vexing matter of nuclear weapons, I am reminded of C.S. Lewis’s famous admonition about demons in The Screwtape Letters: “There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them.”

In statecraft, I recommend a similar approach to nuclear weapons. It is a perilous mistake to disregard the most destructive weapons in human history when an adversary threatens to use them. It is also a mistake to allow a hostile dictator—whether Putin, or Xi Jinping, or North Korea’s Kim Jong Eun—to effectively blackmail the United States and our allies with nuclear threats.

This is not a new challenge. Since the Soviet Union’s first test of an atomic bomb in 1949, for over seven decades the United States has had to contend with a nuclear-armed Kremlin (and since 1964, a nuclear-armed Communist China, too). A major reason why the United States was able to prevent nuclear war and win a peaceful victory in the Cold War was the resolve of our own nuclear arsenal in deterring communist aggression—and strengthening our diplomatic hand.

In this current case of Putin’s panic and nuclear bluster, I think the American response thus far has been appropriately balanced. The White House has privately and publicly warned Russia of “catastrophic consequences” should Moscow detonate any nuclear devices, while remaining appropriately vague about what those specific consequences would be. The Pentagon and intelligence community have also increased monitoring of the Russian nuclear arsenal, alert to any precipitous moves. Taken together, these steps preserve American flexibility while putting Putin on notice. As reckless and ruthless as he can be, Putin in his 22 years in power has always taken great care to avoid any direct conflict with the United States, and he respects American military capabilities.

Ultimately the best way to avoid Putin’s nuclear trap is to support a Ukrainian victory that recaptures Ukraine’s territory but stops at the Russian border, perhaps with some type of small face-saving territorial concession to Putin in Crimea or the far east of Ukraine. To that end, the United States should increase our weapons supplies and other aid so that Ukraine can preserve its gains and battlefield momentum.

The past month has shown how the fortunes of war can quickly change. Yet Putin is not ready to concede, and he knows that the coming of winter brings a new window to pressure a Europe desperate for energy supplies. Hard days, and hard choices, lie ahead.