Russian servicemen march at Red Square during the Victory Day military parade in Moscow
(Picture: AFP/Getty Images)The world is having to ask a question that’s become familiar of late: is Vladimir Putin bluffing?
Russia’s president set his nuclear arsenal on a “special regime of high alert combat duty” in the midst of his invasion of Ukraine.
Citing “aggressive statements” from the opposing nations, he gave the order live on national television on Sunday after the US and European Union dramatically stepped up their response to the attack.
Nuclear specialists are debating what exactly that would mean in practice because Russia does not publish its nuclear procedures.
But the threat seemed clear after Putin’s warning - made as he ordered Ukraine’s invasion on February 24 - that any attempt to interfere would suffer “consequences you have never encountered in your history.”
“Unfortunately we need to take everything seriously given what we’re going through,” Clement Beaune, France’s secretary of state for European affairs, said on Monday, ahead of a security
council meeting to be headed by President Emmanuel Macron.
“But we need to keep cold blood and not react to all provocations, because there are certainly provocations organised by Russia, and yesterday’s speech is part of it.”
Five days into the assault on Ukraine, Russian troops have taken the port city of Berdyansk on the Sea of Azov and on Monday were attacking Mariupol.
Attempts to strike into Kyiv and seize the government have been unsuccessful, with Russian forces still stuck 20 miles from the capital.
Russia retains overwhelming advantages in the field and its identification on Monday of a safe passage corridor from the capital raised fears a much larger assault may be imminent.
Still, the failure to achieve a quick victory against a determined resistance, together with an unexpectedly unified response from Europe and the US, has led to a growing narrative that Putin miscalculated and is lashing out.
The US on Sunday had described Putin’s nuclear decision as “escalatory.” UK Secretary of State for Defence Ben Wallace said the move was “about distracting the world” from Russia’s
setbacks in Ukraine and that it made no change to Russia’s actual nuclear posture.
Those changes are usually signals designed for opposing defence and intelligence agencies to pick up, according to Jeffrey Lewis, of the Middlebury Institute for International Studies in California.
Small changes of alert happen routinely, Lewis said. What makes the Russian move unusual is that for the first time since the 1970s that signal was made on live TV for public consumption.
The aim, he said, might be to spook Germany in particular into losing its resolve to confront Russia.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz ordered a sharp increase in defence spending just hours before Putin’s TV appearance.
“I think that helps reveal his motivation: He has made a series of misjudgments, about the Ukrainians and NATO, and the West more broadly in its unity,” Lewis said. “My guess is that
his goal here is to divide Europe.”
Russia has just under 4,500 nuclear warheads, according to the Bulletin of Nuclear Scientists.
Of those, 1,588 are deployed with the remainder held in reserve. Those warheads are carried
by 336 land-based nuclear missile launchers, 11 nuclear armed submarines and 137 strategic nuclear aircraft, according to the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a London think tank.
The “special regime” the Russian leader talked about probably involves a switch from the peacetime sequence for a nuclear launch to a wartime sequence, according to Pavel Podvig,
a Geneva-based specialist in Russia’s strategic forces and senior researcher at the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research.
That would reduce requirements for firing nuclear missiles to account for the possibility of a first strike.
Such a change would be harder for outsiders to see than the physical dispersal of additional nuclear-armed submarines and other measures that would come with a major change in alert status.
Following up on the threat wouldn’t necessarily mean firing a nuclear missile at a NATO country, Podvig said. Other possibilities include the use of a tactical battlefield nuclear
weapon to end the war in Ukraine.
Equally, Putin could make a conventional challenge to the western security alliance backed by his nuclear threat, aimed at exposing the conditional nature of its Article 5 commitment to
collective defence, according to Francois Heisbourg, a former official in the French foreign and defense ministries.
“We should be very concerned,” said Heisbourg, now adviser to the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a London security think tank.
If Putin’s Ukraine gambit succeeds, he will have Russian forces not just on NATO’s shared frontiers with Russia and Belarus, but also Ukraine and potentially Moldova, he said.
“When was the last time analysts thought that Putin was bluffing? It was five days ago,” Heisbourg said.
“I don’t think he does bluffing. He telegraphs what he wants to do.”
