Anti-West rant exposes Putin’s deadly desperation

Cartoon: Johannes Leak

Yet again, Russia’s President, Vladimir Putin, is threatening to use nuclear weapons. First it was his speech on September 21 about the partial mobilisation of 300,000 Russian troops. Then on Friday he repeated his threats in the context of declaring that “Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson” are now formally part of the territory of the Russian Federation, with the implicit threat that they are now sovereign Russian territory, which will be defended by “all available means”.

Putin’s implicit threat on September 30 was as follows: “I want the Kyiv authorities and their real masters in the West to hear me, so that everyone remembers this: people living in Luhansk and Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporiz`hzhia have become our citizens forever.” He went on to assert that Kyiv’s authorities “should respect this free expression of the people’s will; there is no other way. This is the only way to peace”. In other words, Russia’s unilateral claim to 15 per cent of Ukraine’s territory with 7.5 million people is not negotiable.

I interpret this to mean we are in for a prolonged and potentially very dangerous war in Europe and the prospects of a negotiated ceasefire are remote.

Russian President Vladimir Putin is seen on a screen in Red Square as he addresses a rally marking the annexation of the Ukraine territories of Lugansk, Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia. Picture: AFP

As British historian Lawrence Freedman has noted, there was a more ominous explicit hint, when Putin referred to the US as “the only country in the world that twice used nuclear weapons, destroying the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And they created a precedent”. It is this latter sentence that carries the threat that the US has already used nuclear weapons and, therefore, if Russia decides to use them it will not be the first to break the precedent about the non-use of nuclear weapons.

Freedman is correct in observing Putin did not follow this up with any overt nuclear threats. But I do not share his confidence that Putin’s conveying a sense of the nuclear menace is different from his identifying ways of employing nuclear weapons to help turn the tide of this war. My view is that as long as Ukraine is not made a member of NATO, Putin may well consider that he can get away with the use of tactical nuclear weapons against Ukrainian troop concentrations and associated infrastructure. Immediately after Putin’s statement, President Volodymyr Zelensky pressed with more urgency for the US to fast-track his country’s accession to NATO. This would mean, of course, that once Ukraine joined NATO it would benefit from the provision of the Alliance’s article 5 that an attack on one is an attack on all.

Read the full statement here: https://t.co/S7knlNSYKc

— Senator Penny Wong (@SenatorWong) October 1, 2022

The rest of Putin’s speech was a rant about the West seeking to further dismember Russia and his view that the West is in decline and possesses a decadent and immoral culture. Referring to the West’s insistence on a rules-based international order, Putin proclaims to applause that “Russia is a great thousand-year-old power, a whole civilisation, and it is not going to live by such makeshift, false rules”. He then talks about the West’s plot “to grab hold of Russia’s wealth” in the late 20th century, “when the state had been destroyed”. Putin is referring here to the collapse of the former Soviet Union, which he has described as the greatest geopolitical catastrophe in the 20th century. It is in this context Putin asserts: “A few days ago, people in Donetsk and Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia declared their support for restoring our historical unity.”

In what can only be described as an unhinged speech, Putin accuses the West of the overthrow of faith and traditional values and the suppression of freedom that is coming to resemble a “religion in reverse – pure Satanism”. He ends by predicting what he calls the ongoing collapse of Western hegemony as being irreversible.

So, this is the sinister – some would say perverted – worldview of the President of Russia. He quotes statements, allegedly made “by some high-ranking representatives of the leading NATO countries on the possibility and admissibility of using weapons of mass destruction – nuclear weapons – against Russia”. He claims Russia has different types of weapons as well, “some of them are more modern than the weapons NATO countries have”. His concluding words are that in the event of a threat to the territorial integrity of Russia “and to defend Russia and our people, we will certainly make use of all weapon systems available to us. This is not a bluff”.

As a former senior colleague of mine recently observed, this is all scary stuff. As Andrei Kolesnikov, an outstanding scholar at the Carnegie Moscow Centre, has very recently observed, Putin is taking a huge risk. The economy is doing badly and will not improve by sending huge numbers of additional people to the war in Ukraine. The federal budget revenues will fall – perhaps radically – and the Kremlin will be forced to spend more of its treasure on war. He observes that this will leave the Kremlin with shrinking resources with which to buy the population’s loyalty.

He asks, in such circumstances, what will the dictator’s message be as he seeks to prolong his rule yet further? He fears this war in Europe could continue even when Putin’s resources – both human and psychological – have run out. Kolesnikov’s brave solution is “a Russia free from Putin and Putinism”.

Paul Dibb is emeritus professor of strategic studies at the Australian National University.