"This is not a bluff!": Putin's Latest Nuclear Threat

[Sukla Sen]

The fact that all at the same time Putin has issued orders for "partial mobilisation" meant to conscript a massive additional three hundred thousand fighters strongly suggests that this renewed and heightened threat also is meant to be yet another "bluff" -- designed to make the NATO countries step back from aiding aggressed Ukraine to liberate occupied territories.

This threat had first been issued on Feb. 24th last--just before the launch of invasion--to be repeated periodically by his minions at various levels and he himself interjecting only occasionally.

As far he is concerned, this is, definitely, the most explicit. In a way, it's even more so being concise reiteration of the immediately preceding expounding by the Russian Security Council Deputy Chairman Dmitry Medvedev: "After holding [the referendums] and incorporating new territories into Russia, the geopolitical transformation in the world will become irreversible," and "encroachment on the territory of Russia is a crime, the commission of which allows the use of all the forces of self-defense."

But, even then, in the context of non-execution of earlier threats, Putin considered it essential to scream that it's no bluff--in order to make the threat credible. Unless the threat is credible, the threat is simply useless.

And in order to make it look credible, each successive time one has to scream shriller.

Logically speaking, if Putin is already planning to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear Ukraine, then ordering the partial mobilisation of 300,000 military reservists to supplement some estimated 200,000 Russian personnel currently engaged in combat operations on the soil of Ukraine--which has triggered a veritable wave of exodus from Russia--appears utterly pointless and, even, stupid outright.

But, that's hardly reassuring enough as the compulsion to make the "threat" credible--by continually raising the pitch--has its own inbuilt dangerous dynamic.

That may very well take us to the apocalypse--even without being originally so intended.

Giving in to his nuclear blackmailing is, however, hardly any way out.

Even a limited success would for sure drive him to use the threat more and more--and not less and less.

That much is quite certain.

<<"In the event of a threat to the territorial integrity of our country and to defend Russia and our people, we will certainly make use of all weapon systems available to us,” Russian President Vladimir Putin said in a speech Wednesday. “This is not a bluff.”

When a nuclear-armed state says it’s willing to use “all weapon systems available to us,” it is impossible not to take the threat seriously. For everyone involved in the war in Ukraine — Russia, Ukraine, and the West — Putin, at least rhetorically, raised the stakes of the conflict he started.

But for Russia watchers and nuclear experts, Putin’s warning about protecting Russia’s “territorial integrity” also added a new degree of unpredictability. Russian-backed officials in four Ukrainian regions partially occupied by Russian troops will soon hold referenda on formally joining Russia. Western countries backing Ukraine have already said they won’t recognize these sham votes. The Russian army also does not have full control over any of these territories — Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson — but Moscow will almost certainly use these referenda as a pretext for formally annexing the territories. If that happens, as it’s expected to, some experts fear that Moscow will interpret any Ukrainian efforts to retake these lands as bringing the fight directly against Russia.

And so the question now is: what does Putin, exactly, consider a threat to Russia’s territorial integrity? And would he actually move to use nuclear weapons to defend it?

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As [Andrey] Baklitskiy pointed out, the threat of using nuclear weapons — not actually using them — may be the most powerful tool nuclear states have.>>

(Excerpted from: <https://www.rsn.org/001/what-putins-latest-threats-mean-for-the-risk-of-nuclear-war.html>.)