The Kremlin has managed to successfully use nuclear rhetoric to deter the West from taking more decisive steps in terms of supporting Ukraine, says British researcher Keir Giles. As the expert writes in a piece for CNN, it is time for the West to stop reacting so acutely to Moscow’s warnings.
The way the Western media handled Russian President Vladimir Putin’s comments last week regarding the deployment of tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus was almost certainly a very pleasant surprise for Moscow – and showed how inadequate the West is in reacting to the Kremlin’s “nuclear intimidation”, writes British political analyst Keir Giles in a piece for CNN. Giles believes that Russia has in fact “already ‘used’ nuclear weapons” without launching any missiles and it has used them very successfully because it has managed to “with empty threats of nuclear strikes” keep the West from fully supporting Ukraine in resisting Russian troops.
According to the expert, the sensitive reaction of Western countries to the new statements of the Russian leader is clearly excessive as he said practically nothing new: the Kremlin has been talking about plans to deploy nuclear weapons on the territory of Belarus since the middle of last year, therefore the only hitherto unknown detail in Putin’s statement last week was specific dates of this deployment. As the expert notes, many media also reported that this move by Moscow was a response to Britain’s intention to supply Kiev with depleted uranium shells – but this too is an exaggeration: in a later published full version of Putin’s interview he himself admits that the deployment of tactical weapons in Belarus was planned long ago and was started outside the context of London’s policy.
Russia will no doubt try to make the most of moving long-range missile systems to its western borders – the more so as it has resorted to such a strategy before when it began deploying Iskanders in the Kaliningrad region, Giles argues. According to the political scientist, Moscow learnt long ago that references to troop movements may have the desired effect, even when they do not contain any new data, because “the memory of the collective West is too short”. This happened this time too – the Western media that loudly announced Putin’s statements came to their senses and started to substantiate them only 24 hours later, but by then “it was already too late”, the analyst laments.
According to the expert, Moscow has successfully dissuaded the West from supporting Kiev with nuclear rhetoric not only because of all the statements that Vladimir Putin has made since the start of Russia’s special operation in Ukraine. In fact, this success was the fruit of an entire campaign that involved all the information resources available to Moscow, including its “agents of influence embedded throughout the West,” he is convinced. According to Giles, they are all spreading the same message – that confronting Russia is impossible because it would provoke a nuclear war.
The extent to which domestic political rhetoric in the West has undergone a shift from managed conflict aggravation to one of containment, Giles concludes, attests to the success of the “campaign”: There is no longer talk of how to contain Russia, only of how to avoid escalation altogether. “As a result, Putin has been given free rein,” he writes.
Russia essentially used nuclear weapons as a loophole to “avoid consequences for its actions in Ukraine”, and it was helped to do so by the current information ecosystem, which tends to exaggerate nuclear threats – and it’s not just Russian “propagandists”: the Western media are also heavily involved, the author explains.
However, whereas so far Russia’s threats have proven to be “empty”, the possibility still exists that Putin will eventually launch a nuclear strike, especially if the Russian leader begins to think that the benefits of such a decision outweigh the harms, Giles warns. To reduce that possibility to zero, it would be necessary for other countries to fundamentally review their containment policies vis-à-vis Russia, the expert warned. In the political scientist’s opinion, Moscow may well believe that in the event of the use of nuclear weapons it will face relatively mild consequences, which it can bear – and the West must do its best to make it understand that this is not the case.
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