They’re not interested in taking territory anymore. Maybe at first, but not anymore. They are now interested in killing as many civilians as possible and damaging as much of Ukraine’s infrastructure as possible. They now hope to keep Crimea, and some of the Donbas region.
No only that, but were I Ukraine, I would do whatever I had to to deploy missile systems that can strike within Russia itself, and make it clear that any Russian “exercises” within X hundred kilometers of the border will be considered a prelude to another invasion, and are thus legitimate targets for a first strike.
Russia has proven that they can’t be trusted, and they must be treated accordingly.
I was a naval officer for 30 years and had to listen to this kind of stuff from pseudo-intellectuals who thought that we were a bunch of unsophisticated paranoids on a regular basis.
“The Russians would never do anything like that! You’re just some mindless cog in the military industrial complex.”
The troubling things here to me are:
- Putin himself seems like the type to risk everyone’s life if his own power (and hence existence) is threatened.
- Putin’s power is at serious risk if he loses this war and the economy remains in the toilet.
- The above 2 conditions seem likely to hold.
- The risk is increased if Putin is getting intelligence suggesting that nukes would help him.
- Putin’s invasion of Ukraine demonstrates that he is in fact not getting great intelligence.
That seems to be a pretty factual analysis.
Onto more speculative things… I have no doubt that Putin wargamed all his deterrent options before invading Ukraine. Nukes are his trump card; he would not let these go neglected.
In that analysis, Putin would have no doubt considered that previous episodes of nuclear brinksmanship resulted in Russia’s bluff being called. He will not want to repeat that scenario again. Consequently, he will have analyzed ways to find ways to step on (but not across) a red line that’s already perilously thin.
Going back to the apparent poverty of intel and analysis above, he may reach some disastrous conclusions:
- A wealthy, soft country like the US would happily absorb a nuke on Kyiv to avoid any inconvenience to itself. I wouldn’t gamble on that, but it seems like a supportable gamble. You only need to look at the rhetoric on the Fox/Republican axis to understand that public support would be far from unanimous.
- That there may be some additional step of escalation that’s never been tried before, something that doctrinally wouldn’t necessarily lead to a full escalation. Some sort of “I’m not touching you, but I’ve gone nuclear” scenario. Perhaps something on Russian soil… maybe a declared test, or maybe a fiction that Ukraine crossed the border and had to be nuked. Any pretext to add nukes to the game without actually attacking another country.
That last one is what I think most about. I find it inconceivable that Putin would have entered this situation without thinking what he’d have done if he were facing down Kennedy or Reagan, and come up with an idea to break that historical pattern.
This seems pretty easy to do. Russia could set off a nuke over the Black Sea, or pick a particularly sparse/uninhabited region of Ukraine and set off a very small (but totally noticeable) nuke. Maybe something just half the yield of Nagasaki. The deaths would be few or none but the message would be clear.
What would this accomplish?
Stranger
It might get the West to think, “Okay, the Russians are serious, if we don’t stop supplying and helping the Ukrainians, they’ll start a nuclear WW3.”
Really? That just doesn’t make sense to me.
It would probably be enough to get China out of their corner is the far more likely result.
Do you think that “the West”, i.e. the member states of NATO and other concerned nations, doesn’t take Russia’s extensive and modernized nuclear arsenal and Putin’s scarcely veiled threats to use it seriously?
Stranger
Of course they do. My point is, that’s what Putin might think. He might think, “If I just set off a nuke in a harmless demonstration in or near Ukraine, it’ll frighten the West into backing off and they’ll let us win.”
Putin doesn’t need to do this. “The West” is already being deferential about direct support for Ukraine, e.g. committing to not enforcing a ‘no-fly zone’ or directly transferring significant assets to Ukrainian forces despite previous security assurances. In fact, if Putin stopped just making veiled threats about using nuclear weapons and actually used them, even as a demonstration in an unpopulated area, it just may convince NATO powers that there is no way to prevent escalation and that they might as well look for ways to stop Russia now rather than waiting for him to directly attack Poland or Estonia. The ‘trick’ of nuclear brinksmanship is to make your opponent think you might use your nuclear arsenal but leave enough doubt that they don’t see the profit in a disarming first strike.
What Putin will actually do at this point is anyone’s guess, but if he elects the unprovoked use of nuclear weapons it won’t be as a harmless demonstration.
Stranger
Yes, thanks to its incompetence the once assumed might of the Russian army has been shown to be a shadow. All the more reason to demonstrate that while they may not be able to occupy they can still fuck you up. Will it work to keep the satellite states in line? Maybe not, but its probably his only option.
It is unlikely that Russia would go nuclear. The whole point of the invasion is that Putin still sees independent satellites as belonging to Greater Russia. He would have to justify nuking land he hopes to own, affecting it for decades or centuries, and people he claims share his heritage.
Of course, there has been miscalculation here and an easy victory was denied. It seems real costs were imposed. However, no one wishes to tempt fate or offer no other alternative. So the last two scenarios are very unlikely. The last time a Russian was advised to fire since his computer falsely showed an attack of five incoming missiles - he (fortunately) chose not to, figuring who would attack using so few?
Didn’t the Japanese have a notion along those lines when they attacked Pearl Harbor back in 1941? Attack the Americans and they’ll back off from interfering in the Pacific?
How well did that work out for them?
Authoritarians have a bad habit of looking at the US with all its political in-fighting and display of dirty laundry and assuming that country has gone “soft” or “weak”. So far, that has not been the case.
This is a guy currently citing the ‘cancelling’ of author J.K. Rowling as an analogue for his justification for invasion. I don’t think there is any basis at this point to assert that Putin will make rational decisions.
Stansilav Petrov was not a missile launch officer or in any way directly involved in the decision to launch missiles; he was working in the early warning detection system, and had the specific knowledge of the flaws of the system (because he was involved in development) and just happened to be subbing for another officer (and came from a civilian education background instead of through the Soviet military academy system) when he defied procedures and unilaterally decided to not forward the alert up the chain. The lesson of Stanislav Petrov is not that there will always be someone with a cool head to avert disaster from bad decisions and errors, but that a system that depends upon such is fundamentally flawed. And that is just as true for the US and every other nuclear weapon-capable nation as it is for Russia and the former Soviet Union.
Stranger
These are fair points.
I’ve long held the belief nuclear war would never happen bc the people in power love all the privileges their life affords and they’re not going to give that up over politics.
But I don’t know, Putin seems like the kind of guy who would cut off his own nose to spite his face.
I also find myself questioning the state of Russia’s nuclear arms. Have they been maintained properly? Are they even going to work? What happens if he fires one off and it blows up his own country instead?
My admittedly limited knowledge gives me the impression that a “failed” nuke most likely just won’t work, or there might be a small explosion, but not a nuclear explosion as causing one of those requires some finicky things happen in a precise manner in a precise order.
If one fails and lands in Russia Putin will probably claim it’s an attack from outside Russia. Or try to cover it up entirely. Depends on the extent of the mess made.
As for maintenance and whether or not they’d work - who knows? While a lot of military funds apparently went to yachts, hookers, and blow there might be areas of the military that actually were properly cared for.
The Russian military has been on a campaign over the last decade or so to retire older weapon systems and deploy more modern ones with more capability and modern countermeasures. The handful of tests that have been done in public view have demonstrated some pretty impressive performance. How that translates to the actual reliability of their deployed systems in toto and how much they have done to assure the reliability of the actual nuclear weapons I do not know but I do not think that the poor readiness and training state of their conventional army necessarily reflects the capability of their nuclear arsenal and that it may not be reliable enough to cause great devastation is not a wager I’d care to roll the dice on.
Stranger
I agree. If Putin wants to see full and total sanctions on every single thing from every single country in the world, combined with a blockade of every Russian port… this would be the way to go.