Vladimir Putin Inserts ‘Crazy’ Threat of Nuclear War Into Ukraine Diplomacy
Russian President Vladimir Putin raised the specter of nuclear war over Ukraine this week, a threat that strikes Western observers as both “crazy” and an effort to rig the diplomatic game in his favor.
“He goes pretty far,” Atlantic Council visiting fellow Petr Tuma, a career Czech diplomat seconded at the Washington, D.C.,-based think-tank, told the Washington Examiner. “It’s crazy to even mention something like this.”
Yet Putin broached the subject during a joint press conference with French President Emmanuel Macron, who had traveled to Moscow in search of a way to avert a major new Russian offensive against Ukraine. It’s a shocking rhetorical maneuver by conventional diplomatic standards, but trans-Atlantic officials and analysts regard it as just the latest Kremlin effort to use the threat of violence to gain leverage in negotiations with Western officials.
“He perceives that it works as a deterrent against the West, to talk about nuclear weapons, to talk about nuclear war,” a senior European official told the Washington Examiner. “It’s not something that you hear that often in the West because people have a long-held taboo that nuclear war is not winnable and that modern countries don’t threaten each other with nuclear war.”
Putin and President Joe Biden affirmed the principle that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought,” but Western officials believe that Russian military strategists have developed nuclear weapons that they regard as substantial enough to win a conflict in Europe without provoking a full-scale nuclear response from the United States. Against that backdrop, Putin described a hypothetical crisis in which he would feel obliged to use nuclear weapons to defend Russia’s control of Crimea, a peninsula that he annexed from Ukraine in 2014. (Read more from “Vladimir Putin Inserts ‘Crazy’ Threat of Nuclear War Into Ukraine Diplomacy” HERE)
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