49 - Risk-taking and Nuclear Dangers: the Putin Paradigm
Putin is a risk taker prone to miscalculation. Think of invading Ukraine in the first place, barging into Syria, using nerve agents against his enemies, employing cyber methods against companies, banks, and more across the world, and interfering blatantly in U. S. and other national elections.
Despite his aggressive but largely carefully focused rhetoric on Monday, we should not cease regarding Putin as capable of springing dangerous surprises. That would include some use of nuclear weapons, presumably tactical ones at first; the more Putin’s armies are bogged down in the marshes of eastern Ukraine, the more their territorial gains may seem achievable only by massive shelling and bombing, including nuclear ones. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has already admitted that the danger of an all-out nuclear exchange is “considerable.” Putin and Lavrov have both decried the U. S.’ proxy war in Ukraine, and promised “lightening fast responses.”
The employment of the nuclear game-changer need not be against civilians or life threatening. Putin could decide to demonstrate North Korean style how his nuclear arsenal works by firing an atomic missile over the Arctic Sea, or even into the Black Sea. He could follow such a demonstration with a demand for concessions from his foes. His adversaries would then be compelled to worry about escalation – about turning a sclerotic if death dealing war of attrition into a tactical nuclear conflict that carries the catastrophic seeds of an all out miscalculated atomic cataclysm.
A number of analysts cannot imagine that Putin or anyone else would war with such weapons. The costs in suffering are too high. Moreover, mutually assured deterrence and destruction has consequences for all sides, especially for the weaker and more desperate contender. We can take only modest comfort in the absence of nuclear conflicts since the ending of the war against Japan. Indeed, because Putin has shown a willingness to gamble with human lives and national consequences, and because he is the antithesis of responsible national leadership – putting his personal ambitions and ego needs first – he may find his limited options broadened only by flashing the atomic option. As he said on Monday to the victory parade in Moscow, the Russian military would keep fighting to rid Ukraine of “torturers, death squads, and Nazis.” Bizarre, and straight out of Orwell, but that kind of mindset could lead to extreme actions when nothing else works.
Senior unnamed American warriors and officials say that if Putin were to move toward deploying a nuclear option, then “all bets are off.” A professorial colleague recommends attempting to reach directly into high-level Russian military ranks to urge generals in charge to disobey any order from Putin to launch atomic missiles directed at the U. S. or its allies. Doing so would be illegal, distribute radiation to civilians and even Russian troops, and immediately be considered heinous war crimes. But we have seen no evidence so far that Putin’s general staff talks back to its misguided leader. In fact, by coercing everyone around him, and the Russian people, for most of the past two decades, Putin may be untouchable as well as unreachable.
Putin has also learned over the last twenty years that no one in Russia (except Alexei Navalny, several brave journalists who have been killed, and an unusual oligarch like Mikhail Khordokovsky, who spent seven years in a Siberian gulag for his pains) really will take him to task for bombing Grozny, the Chechen capital, into rubble; for invading Georgia in 2008; for grabbing Crimea and eastern Ukraine in 2014; and for intervening in Syria and flattening Aleppo, with large losses of life, in 2015. Why, he must say to himself, should today’s war in Ukraine end any differently than the other adventures? Who is going to oppose his ambitions and his vanity war in Ukraine?
Possibly, too, Putin lives in a bubble where his subordinates only tell him what they think he wants to hear. Perhaps he is delusional enough (although there no evidence so far) to think that a mass of Russian-speaking Ukrainians will shortly turn against their country and defect to Russia. That is nowhere occurring, even when the perils of war are paramount. Or perhaps Putin still thinks that Ukrainians will shortly opt to renounce their Ukrainian ethnic ties and turn against their Jewish leader? Can Putin foolishly be counting on primordial anti-Semitism to save Russia assault? If he believes anything like such wild conclusions, then the war may indeed go on and on.
So far, Putin may be behaving in a sociopathic fashion, killing civilians indiscriminately and urging his soldiers and pilots to pound away mercilessly at every day Ukrainians, even children huddling under their school. But there is still a patina of rationality involved. He has given orders to annihilate and conquer along the eastern and south coasts of Ukraine in order, one suspects, to control Odesa and the other seaports, thus blocking Ukraine from the Black Sea and ending its ability to export products of the soil and import foodstuffs to feed its citizens. Taking Odesa would also enable Putin to threaten Moldova, where a tiny pro-Russian separatist province stands between the Ukrainian border and the bulk of Romanian-speaking Moldova, once a Soviet possession.
Gaining such territorial control would enable Putin, or so he believes, to strangle Ukraine economically and force it to sue for a peace favorable to Putin. Under President Volodymyr Zelensky, that is never going to happen. But Putin has succeeded so many times before 2022 that he still believes that his militarized blackmail will work once again.
For all of those reasons, the Western supporters of Ukraine must now re-double their assistance to Ukraine. The new lend-lease act will help supply Ukraine’s army with additional weaponry. So will the comparable efforts of almost all of the nations of Europe. Odesa, in innumerable senses, must never be allowed to fall.