There’s a growing realization in the Kremlin that the West is not falling for its nuclear threats and Putin is searching for new ways to enforce his red lines.

By Catherine Belton and 

Robyn Dixon

September 22, 2024 at 3:00 a.m. EDT

When Russian President Vladimir Putin warned last week that Western approval for Ukraine to strike deep inside Russia would mean Moscow was at war with NATO, Russian propagandists rushed to rattle the nuclear saber.

Alexander Mikhailov, director of the Bureau of Military Political Analysis, called for bombing plywood mock-ups of London and Washington — complete with replicas of Buckingham Palace, Big Ben and the White House — to simulate nuclear strikes, so that they would “burn so beautifully that it will horrify the world.”

The speaker of the lower house, Vyacheslav Volodin, warned that strikes on Russia would lead to war with nuclear weapons and reminded the European Parliament that its headquarters in Strasbourg was only a three-minute flight for a Russian ICBM.

But inside the Kremlin, there is a growing recognition that the repeated use of the nuclear threat is starting to lose its potency and Moscow’s red lines are constantly being crossed. Analysts and officials close to senior Russian diplomats said instead that Putin is casting around for a more nuanced and limited response to the West allowing Ukraine to use longer range missiles to strike Russia.

“There has been an overflow of nuclear threats,” said a Russian official speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject. “There is already immunity to such statements, and they don’t frighten anyone.”

A Russian academic with close ties to senior Russian diplomats agreed, calling the nuclear option “the least possible” of scenarios, “because it really would lead to dissatisfaction among Russia’s partners in the Global South and also because clearly, from a military point of view, it is not very effective.”

“All this discussion of the nuclear threshold overexaggerates the threat of such a type of escalation and underestimates the possibility of alternative options,” the academic added. “Since the West has a global military infrastructure … a lot of vulnerable points can be found.”

Putin is searching through a range of options to deter Western support for Ukraine and try to enforce his red lines, said Tatiana Stanovaya, the founder of France-based political consultancy R-Politik. “There are options he doesn’t want to deploy, and there are options he is ready to review today,” she said, and he sees nuclear weapons as the “worst option for everyone including for himself.”

Nuclear measures or a direct attack on NATO territory would only be considered if “Putin feels there is a threat to the existence of Russia in its current form, when he considers there is no other way out,” she said. “For such a situation, the West should go a lot further than what it is discussing now.”

Russian officials already appeared to be placated to some degree by the United States’ apparent hesitation so far to lifting restrictions on Ukraine striking military targets deep inside Russia using Western missiles. The expectation was growing that if permission was granted it would be “very limited,” analysts and officials said.

Putin, however, is still under pressure to respond in some way and stop his red lines from being constantly crossed.

“There is an understanding that the red lines drawn by Moscow are being ignored by the West, and there should be weightier and more significant steps from Moscow to demonstrate the seriousness of its intentions,” said the academic.

Since the 2022 invasion, Russia has warned against the West supplying modern fighter jets like F-16s, main battle tanks and missiles to Ukraine, and each has eventually come to pass.

Putin is seeing a trend where Ukraine’s western allies keep allowing Kyiv to expand its activities, said Stanovaya, and the trend is scaring him, especially if it leads to increased missile strikes inside Russia. “For Putin this is a qualitative shift which takes the situation to a new level and which could be followed by a further expansion.”

Moscow could opt to respond with sabotage operations against military targets or other infrastructure in the West where Russia’s participation could be difficult to prove. It could also turn to proxy groups that are already battling Western interests, like the Houthi militia in Yemen that has been attacking Red Sea shipping, said Lawrence Freedman, emeritus professor of War Studies at Kings College, London — highlighting a possibility also raised by the Russian academic.

“He doesn’t want to turn into anything dramatic or drastic, in the sense of nuclear, or direct fighting between our troops and his troops, but [that] doesn’t mean to say that there’s not something serious going on,” Freedman said.

Sergei Markov, the hawkish Kremlin-connected political analyst, said there was a growing realization in the top ranks of the Russian military that “Russia has spoiled the West, and that we have spoken a lot about red lines but we haven’t done anything. At some point we will have to escalate.”

Markov suggested possible responses could include the closure of the British Embassy in Moscow and strikes on air bases in Poland and Romania where F-16s being deployed by Ukraine are based. “Since Russia is sure that at some point strikes on Moscow will definitely happen, then we need to hit first,” he said.

While Stanovaya dismissed any such strikes on a NATO air bases as unlikely and only in case of desperation, the nuclear rhetoric does have its uses. Both she and Markov point out how members of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s campaign have amplified Moscow’s threats as a campaign issue.

This week, Trump and former independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wrote in an op-ed for the Hill that a decision to grant Ukraine permission to use Western long range missiles “would put the world at greater risk of nuclear conflagration than at any time since the Cuban missile crisis” and called for direct negotiations with Moscow instead.

Putin could seek to increase the threat and play a “golden card” by escalating before the elections, Markov claimed. “If Putin escalates, then the U.S. will fear nuclear war and Trump will win.” 

Freedman also noted that Putin’s nuclear threats were deliberately ambiguous to increase their sense of danger. “It sounds menacing, but he never actually is very specific about what he’s going to do. He allows us to make our own interpretations, and people interpret the worst.”

Ultimately, however, as the effectiveness of this approach wanes, Putin has not yet figured out what to replace it with, said Stanovaya, and uncertainty was growing since “no one understands” which responses Putin would eventually choose for every concrete action.

“I think Putin doesn’t understand either,” she said.

By Catherine Belton Catherine Belton is an international investigative reporter for The Washington Post, reporting on Russia. She is the author of “Putin’s People,” a New York Times Critics’ Book of 2020 and a book of the year for the Times, the Economist and the Financial Times. Belton has worked for Reuters and the Financial Times.follow on X @CatherineBelton

By Robyn Dixon Robyn Dixon is a foreign correspondent on her third stint in Russia, after almost a decade reporting there beginning in the early 1990s. In November 2019 she joined The Washington Post as Moscow bureau chief. follow on X @RobynDixon__