Economic warfare
Russian officials seem to believe that they could deploy a nuclear weapon in Ukraine without running a high risk of military retaliation from NATO. “Overseas and European demagogues are not going to perish in a nuclear apocalypse,” Dmitri Medvedev, vice chairman of Putin’s security council, wrote in a post on the Telegram social network. “Therefore, they will swallow the use of any weapon in the current conflict.”
But inviting a “nuclear apocalypse” and doing nothing are not the only ways Ukraine’s allies could respond:
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Ukraine has received tens of billions of dollars in military aid, including $15 billion in weapons and equipment from the United States. Still, after Putin brandished the nuclear option last week, Zelensky called on allies to provide his military with tanks for its offensives in the east and the south, as well as air defenses to protect civilian infrastructure from Russian barrages. Should Putin follow through on his threat, those allies may feel more pressure to grant Zelensky’s request.
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As severe as the sanctions on Russia are now, Eliot A. Cohen, a professor at the school of international studies at Johns Hopkins, argues that Ukraine’s allies still have economic arrows in their quiver: The United States, in particular, he says, could impose unlimited secondary sanctions on anyone doing business with Russia and move to confiscate the roughly $300 billion Russia has in accounts held abroad. Ukraine’s allies are also mulling putting a price cap on Russian oil to further squeeze the Russian economy.
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Some analysts believe that the oil price cap scheme could succeed only with the cooperation of big oil purchasers like China and India, which, like most of the world’s 195 countries, have not joined in imposing sanctions on Russia. If Putin were to break the nuclear taboo, however, that could well change: “The whole world would stop,” said Joseph Cirincione, a nuclear expert at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.
Yet given the strength of Putin’s resolve to this point, some analysts doubt that expanded sanctions and military support would be enough to break it or restore the nuclear taboo. “Moscow would have gotten away with using a nuclear weapon, shown that deterrence was meaningless, and set itself up to use nuclear weapons again in the future,” Dan Goure, a vice president at the public-policy research think tank Lexington Institute, writes in The National Interest. “Putin’s fortunes at home would certainly improve. He would claim to be the Russian leader that stood up to the West and got away with employing a nuclear weapon to defend the motherland.”
The window for negotiations is closing. Would a nuclear detonation open it or slam it shut?
Shocking as a Russian nuclear detonation would be, the strategic payoff would be far from certain: Last week, the Institute for the Study of War concluded that at best, the use of even multiple tactical nuclear weapons would merely freeze the war’s front lines, enabling the Kremlin to retain the Ukrainian territory it now occupies. But it would not, the institute concluded, “enable Russian offensives to capture the entirety of Ukraine.”
For many high-ranking Russian officials and elites, if not for Putin himself, “entering into talks now with the gains Russia has already made under its belt would be an entirely reasonable course of action that would not necessarily mean defeat,” Tatiana Stanovaya writes for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
If she is right, there might be an opportunity to avert a nuclear strike in the first place, and some believe that Ukrainians should at least try to seize it. “A cease-fire would help to calm the situation and avoid further escalation,” writes Christopher Chivvis, director of the American statecraft program at Carnegie. “Western capitals should at least point out to Ukrainian leaders that their prospects of retaking all their territory may not be as bright as they hope.”