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Putin, a situation which he would want to avoid, and in order to give a warning to the West to
not come into a conflict to oppose the Russian Federation militarily itself directly.
Russia as a nuclear-power;
The Russian Federation and its predecessor state, the Soviet Union has historically relied
upon two major tools of exerting and influencing their hard power, one of which is their
conventional military forces, and the other, the vast nuclear arsenal that Russia herself
possesses. The armed forces themselves have been used to threaten and keep states that
Russia wishes so to control, in check, while the nuclear armada in order to stave off any
military response from the United States or its allies. However in present-day, Russia’s
conventional military prominence is greatly dwarfed by the largest nuclear stockpile in the
world and the ability to utilise them anywhere, anytime in any part of the world.
Naturally, Russia has maintained its nuclear arsenal for the same purpose as did the USSR, in
order to threaten smaller, less significant states and instead exert its power and dominance.
But in a world where Russia no longer has the support of her former-Warsaw Pact allies and
where its prime adversary is NATO, which it regards as a threat to Russia’s very own
existence, and NATO military forces make Russia’s military assets look increasingly less
effective and competitive, and in a vastly less quantity to their own, Russia has been seeking
to rely upon its nuclear assets to do the job of the conventional forces, in order to get its way
and prevent attack from any other state.
As far as the Russia-Ukraine conflict is concerned however, it has become somewhat
common, especially since the 2023 Ukrainian Kharkov and Kherson counter-offensive, that
whenever Russia faces any kind of setback or difficulties in completing their objectives, on
the battlefield and off it, prominent Russian leaders such as Dmitry Medvedev, the
Vice-Chairman of Russia’s National Security Council, Ramzan Kadyrov, the Head of
Russia’s Chechen Republic, and Sergei Karaganov, the Honorary Chairman of Russia’s
Council on Foreign and Defense Policy , issue numerous statements that point to Russia
threatening to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine in order to prevent a Ukrainian victory.
The issue that arises here firstly, is that Russian officials have used this threat in normalcy
which completely erodes the gravity of such a statement being considered as a realistic
deterrent by NATO or the West. Moreover, due to the large-scale predicted destruction and
the facade of a nuclear weapon free world since 1945, no state realistically believes that any
nation, including Russia, would willingly break this ‘taboo’ on the use of nuclear weapons
anymore.
It is pertinent however to note that as a result of Russia’s conventional losses on the
battlefield, Vladimir Putin may resort to unorthodox weapons- including nuclear weapons in
order to further end the war in Ukraine quickly and in doing so possibly fulfil one of his other
aims: to revive the deterrence factor of Russia’s nuclear legion.
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