Simonyan’s influence is not extreme. Her words were consciously echoed by Putin himself in 2019, when, answering a question about the nuclear war, he said “we will go to paradise as witnesses, they will just cry because they will not even have time to repent.”
Putin himself has long used the spectrum of Russia’s nuclear arsenal with messianic abandonment. It is clearly a source of deep pride that Russia’s nuclear stockpile is once again the largest in the world, lovingly restored to the size and stature of its Soviet prosperity.
This is more than can be said for Russia’s post-Soviet politicians. In the Cold War era, politicians on both sides were more cautious about displaying weapons of mass destruction, more aware of the horror involved. The leaders of the Soviet Union and the United States signed many important arms control agreements, including the precursor to the current New START Treaty. Thanks to this treaty, the Russians warned the Americans that they were test-launching the new RS-28 Sarmat missile, avoiding the escalation of an already tense atmosphere. On Friday, the US Department of Defense confirmed that it did not expect Russia to use nuclear missiles in Ukraine.
This network of agreements and priorities is reassuring, until you remember that Russia is not the Soviet Union, this type of arms control is under intense pressure, and Russia’s war in Ukraine is fueled by deep irrational thinking. Armed with mythology rather than analysis, the military has failed to achieve its goals, and Russian elites are now blaming everyone for the results, highlighting increasingly absurd enemies, from NATO to a US-backed gay group. to the Satanists.
Many Russian politicians have made it clear that they see Ukraine as a proxy war with NATO and the West, partly to divert attention from military performance but partly because they believe so. The idea that Russia is at war with the West pervaded the 2021 National Security Strategy and the recent comment by Nikolai Patrushev, one of Putin’s closest advisers.
Putin threatened the West with a “lightning response” if it went much further in helping Ukraine, leaving a strategic ambiguity as to what exactly it meant. Judging by his rhetoric and his very decision to invade and destroy Ukraine, Putin’s decisions can not be evaluated outside the context of the messianic testimony in which the nuclear war in Russia is presented and discussed.
The willingness to embrace, even rhetorically, mass death reflects in part a social engagement with the heroism of war, but it is also an indicator of existential anguish. In this sense, the Western threat is real not only for Russia but also for Putin – if the Russian president is interested in making the distinction. Putin is said to have been haunted by the brutal death of Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi. He probably knows that the individualized dictatorships of the type he has created seldom pass peacefully. Faced with a disgraceful defeat or regime change, Putin may well feel (personally) threatening to launch a nuclear weapon.
Presented with the vision of bloody nuclear extermination, it is normal to try to reason and reconcile the goals and language of the Russian elites with our own examples and contexts. But the Russians’ perception is no longer decipherable only through cost-risk analysis.
There are some measures that may be prudent – in addition to strong support for Ukraine, Western countries should be clear that they do not seek regime change in Russia and find ways to keep the right channels open – but no one can pretend that has the solution.
That’s why Western leaders need to include the unthinkable in their calculations. If Salisbury’s poisonings, political assassinations and the Ukrainian invasion have proved anything, it is his recklessness to boldly declare: “Putin will never.” Rationalization will not protect us from the irrational.
Dr. Jade McGlynn is a writer and academic at the Monterey Initiative in Russian Studies
