Putin’s empire strikes back — but will he go nuclear?
The Russians are not yet exhausted, as this week’s bombardments showed.
– Vladimir Putin, televised address, September 30
Russia’s President, Vladimir Putin, has set himself on a path of military escalation in the war on Ukraine. This escalation threatens the use of nuclear weapons for the first time since Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. And that in turn threatens everything.
Putin’s televised address on September 30 was a bitter, vitriolic affair, full of abuse of the perfidious West and the “neo-Nazis” in Ukraine, calling out instead the glory of Russia, its centrality to the human condition and the destiny of the planet.
The invasion of Ukraine has been a catastrophic disaster for Russia, so far. The Russian military has presented an old-fashioned Soviet version of itself, a lumbering, industrial dinosaur, its army moving at a dinosaur’s pace, recalling a vision of brutalist factory power circa 1950.
Ukraine, on the other hand, has been nimble, fleet of foot, agile, digital, dispersed. Stylistically, it has been a war of Google versus Oldsmobile. For once, the old insight of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, that in the battle between quality and quantity, quantity has a quality all its own, has been turned on its head.
But don’t think this war is over, nor the victor yet decided.
Putin is isolated, paranoid, furious, fiercely determined, and he rules modern Russia absolutely.
Kevin Rudd this week published a brilliant essay on China’s Xi Jinping. Its key insight is that Xi is essentially an ideologue.
The West, which has intellectually trashed the idea of grand narrative and transcendent belief, can no longer really comprehend ideology. But Xi believes in the Marxist-Leninist ideology of the Chinese Communist Party. You cannot understand his behaviour as president if you don’t start with ideology.
Something similar is true of Putin. He broods with seething anger on the collapse of the Soviet Union, he hates the material success of Western Europe, he despises NATO, he cannot understand how the superior culture and history of Russia do not translate into global leadership.
Putin, like Xi, has many personality characteristics that influence his behaviour, but you cannot understand anything of what he does without taking account of the ideology of Russian ultranationalism, and the supporting narrative of Russian global centrality, Russian historical necessity and even, as Putin has many times made clear, Russian spiritual superiority. It is not more nor less rational than communist ideology, and Putin believes it implicitly, just as Xi believes in communism implicitly.
This week, on the battlefield, Ukraine made more advances on the ground, but Putin signalled escalation. The Ukrainian military has reclaimed thousands of square kilometres in the north, around Kharkiv, taking back Lyman and surrounding territory. It has also made steady gains and some key breakthroughs in the south, near Kherson.
Russia still controls nearly 15 per cent of Ukraine’s territory but it’s going backwards. Ukraine showed a determination to take back all Ukrainian territory by detonating a truck bomb on the Kerch bridge in Crimea, which links the end of the Crimean peninsula to mainland Russia. The Ukrainians have not formally claimed responsibility for this blast but there are no other candidates.
It demonstrated the Ukrainians can strike deep within Russian controlled territory. The Russian military had made protection of the Kerch bridge, which itself was a great symbol of national achievement for them, one of their highest priorities. The bridge was the main way for Russia to move supplies to their forces in southern Ukraine. Logistics has been a nightmare for the Russians.
Putin was outraged by the Kerch attack, as he is outraged by the whole course of this war, which has gone just about exactly the opposite to what his cowering officials told him to expect. And so he struck back savagely. On Monday, Russia launched 83 missiles at more than 20 Ukrainian cities. These were fired from strategic bombers and submarines, the same platforms that would fire nuclear weapons.
Some of the missiles were targeted at critical Ukrainian infrastructure, power stations and dams, but some were targeted at civilian apartment blocks and even schools and playgrounds. The Ukrainians say they intercepted roughly half the missiles.
The next day the barrage continued, though at a reduced rate and more precisely targeted at energy infrastructure.
Putin also appointed General Sergei Surovikin to command the battle. Surovikin is just the kind of general Putin likes. He was arrested once, in Moscow’s brief democratic spring, for civilian demonstrators being killed by his soldiers. He was also charged once with illegal arms trading. But what most endears him to Putin, apparently, is that in Syria he bombed Aleppo to bits. Putin likes this sort of tactic, which he also applied against the Chechens.
Russia began this war with enormous advantages over Ukraine. Russia is vastly bigger. It has a huge military. It has a big, modern air force. Although the attacking military traditionally needs more forces than the defenders, it also benefited from the short distances involved in going to war with its next-door neighbour.
I don’t know any serious military analyst who thought the Ukrainians could prevail. And of course the Ukrainians haven’t prevailed yet. But they fought with tremendous spirit, courage and versatility.
Russia had a unified and centralised command. In certain types of battle, that can be an advantage. But the Ukrainians had swarms of clever people with initiative and some training. They mastered the decentralised, digital swarm technologies of contemporary warfare.
A single soldier with a shoulder-launched rocket can take out a tank parked in a stationary line of “advancing” military traffic. Cheap drones can carry explosives. Lots of cheap drones can confuse even relatively hi-tech defensive systems looking for missiles.
Every time the Ukrainians achieved some heroic battlefield success, they had three non-kinetic effects. They demoralised the Russians. They energised their own people. And they put vast moral and political pressure on Western nations, the NATO Europeans and the US, but even nations such as Australia, to help them with more sophisticated weapons.
Soon enough the Ukrainians in some measures had better weapons than the Russians – more accurate missiles and artillery, HIMARS (High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems) artillery launchers, radars, lots and lots of offensive drones. Then they started to get Western satellite intelligence. Elon Musk’s Starlink restored their internet connections. They asked for help from any computer nerd in the world who wanted to hurt the Russians so, remarkably, they kept ahead of Russian cyber attacks.
Now the Ukrainians are asking for better air defence systems to protect their cities, and the US, Britain and Germany have systems on their way.
Putin still has great reservoirs of strength to call on. The Russians are by no means exhausted. But there are only a few ways they can escalate from here.
First is to bring to bear their huge numerical advantage. Putin is trying to do this with a call-up of 300,000 reservists. This will be done very inefficiently. Corruption was always the weak point of communist systems. Much of the money meant for Russia’s army was stolen.
But if Russia gets even some tens of thousands of semi-competent troops into battle it will relieve the gravely fatigued Russian soldiers on the front. Winter is approaching in Ukraine. This will make the kind of high-mobility manoeuvre tactics the Ukrainians have been following more difficult.
The Russians would no doubt like the conflict to be “frozen” for a couple of months so they can lick their wounds and replenish. But they are also having difficulty manufacturing many of the weapons and ammunition they use because of constrained and interrupted supply lines due to Western sanctions.
Theoretically Russia could open another front in the war with troops from Belarus. But the Belarusians are a poorly trained and equipped army, and deeply unmotivated to fight in Ukraine.
The second method of escalation is to keep hitting Ukrainian civilian targets. Sending missiles at apartment blocks raises the outrage of the world. But hitting energy infrastructure is something closer to a conventional act of war. Putin is escalating this way.
The third and last type of escalation available to Putin is a nuclear strike. Even Putin would not use a strategic nuclear weapon. But Russia has 2000-odd tactical nuclear weapons, the smallest of which would still be a huge explosion, something like the 2020 accidental ammonium nitrate explosion that crippled the port of Beirut.
Such a weapon could have a military effect, though Ukraine has kept its forces dispersed partly to avoid furnishing an obvious military target. But Putin’s real aim would be psychological. It would be an astoundingly dangerous move.
US President Joe Biden says the world is closer to nuclear Armageddon than at any time since the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. Putin keeps threatening to use nuclear weapons. In his recent televised speech he said the US set a precedent by using nuclear weapons against Japan. (He also, incidentally, denounced AUKUS in this speech.)
Putin would hope if not to transform the battlefield directly with a tactical nuclear weapon at least to do so indirectly. He thought that by starving Western Europe of energy in the approaching winter he would easily break its resolve to support Ukraine. That didn’t work.
But Putin may hold the hope that using a nuclear weapon could transform Europe’s attitude to the war. This is because of the remorseless logic of nuclear escalation. It is not absolutely certain that the Russian military, which has demonstrated such monumental incompetence, could fire a nuclear weapon exactly as it wished to.
Putin could possibly stage a nuclear test, or a demonstration, perhaps out to sea. If he unleashes any kind of nuclear weapon NATO would probably respond decisively, not with a nuclear strike in retaliation but with devastating conventional attacks on Russian military assets in Ukraine.
What would Putin do in response? All his conventional military options would be exhausted.
Yet he would still have 2000 tactical nuclear weapons and several thousand strategic nuclear weapons. Putin’s September 30 speech was darkly sinister, filled with grandiose resentment, almost millenarian. If he was humiliated on the battlefield, he would not only lose office but probably lose his life.
It is just the sheer, terrifying uncertainty of this moment, Putin might calculate, probably wrongly, that would cause NATO, Biden and the Europeans to find him an off ramp, to stop and negotiate. Yet if NATO does not respond militarily to Putin launching any kind of nuclear weapon then it declares that tactical nuclear weapons are acceptable in a conventional conflict, acceptable for Russia, and presumably for China.
Paul Dibb, who held many senior positions in Australian intelligence and Defence, knows Russian strategic issues as well as any Australian. He thinks the use of nuclear weapons a real possibility: “I fear Putin is not frightened of using a tactical nuclear weapon. He would hope to provoke fear, in the US, in Germany, of the slippery slope to conflagration.”
Malcolm Davis of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute shares Dibb’s sombre judgment: “The Russians are staring defeat in the face. The mass mobilisation probably won’t deliver competent mass forces to the front to blunt Ukrainian offensives. This leads to the chance of the use of tactical nuclear weapons. Putin faces the prospect of defeat and a coup, so he would use nuclear weapons rather than face defeat.”
Neither Dibb nor Davis can see how the conflict ends. Here is one disturbing straw in the wind. The only people in Russia allowed to criticise the Russian war effort are those who criticise it from the right, who think it’s too soft.
There’s a beguiling Western fantasy that if Putin goes he will be replaced by someone like the jailed opposition leader Alexei Navalny, Russia will join the community of democracies and all will be good. This is extremely unlikely.
The great lesson of the 20th and 19th centuries is that nationalism tends to trump everything. Xi cultivated intense Chinese nationalism as a domestic ruling strategy and an international operating principle. Putin has stoked intense Russian nationalism. He has abandoned communism but conscripted every symbol of Russian culture, from the gravely compromised Russian Orthodox Church through Russian literature and music, all to bolster a paranoid, toxic, extravagant nationalism.
His people are not exactly on fire with nationalism but they are willing to see the West as the enemy. But Putin’s nationalism has certainly encouraged a huge ruling clique of hardliners. If Putin goes, his replacement could be equally hard line or worse. Post-Putin, a savagely divided Russia, or an unstable Russia ruled by a hard-line nationalist, is not necessarily going to be easier to deal with.
Here is the central contradiction: Putin won’t accept a settlement in which he has to relinquish all the Ukrainian territory he has occupied. The Ukrainians won’t accept a settlement in which Putin keeps a big chunk of their territory and can launch war again whenever he’s ready.
As Putin sits alone in one of his Kremlin palaces, perhaps where Ivan the Terrible murdered his son, cursing his enemies and the feebleness of his subordinates, ruminating on Russia’s thousand-year history and what should be his rightful place in it, counting up his potential enemies at home and all the powerful people he has humiliated and diminished, his ingrained bias for action will lead his mind down many dark roads.
Do any of them end in a mushroom cloud?
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