Putin’s Nuclear Threats Are Starting To Backfire - Newsweek

Vladimir Putin possesses the world’s largest nuclear arsenal. His neighbors no longer seem to care.

Lithuania spent last week preparing to remove a post-Soviet restriction from its constitution that prevents NATO from stationing nuclear weapons there—then openly dismissed the threat that followed from the Kremlin.

This morning, Finland’s President Alexander Stubb went one better, announcing his country was joining a French initiative that could see Helsinki exercise with France’s nuclear forces and temporarily host French strategic aircraft on Finnish soil.

This is not good for the Russian president. For so long, his most valuable nuclear weapon has been the one sitting quietly in its silo. It doesn’t need to be used—just the knowledge it could be has allowed the Kremlin to cajole, coerce and outright bully Western-aligned governments into inaction.

Lithuania and Finland suggest Putin’s words may be losing their punch. What will he do when words stop working?

Besides Ukraine, no country embodies the shift in Europe’s attitude to Russia’s nuclear threat better than Lithuania.

Article 137 of its constitution, written as the country emerged from Soviet occupation, bans Lithuania from hosting weapons of mass destruction or foreign military bases on its soil. Last week, the Seimas Legal Affairs Committee voted 7—2 to back an amendment scrapping it, pending full parliamentary approval.

The amendment's explanatory note could hardly be clearer. Russia's invasion of Ukraine, escalating nuclear rhetoric and military buildup mean Lithuania can no longer be prevented from enjoying "the full potential of NATO deterrence."

The Kremlin responded on cue. Speaking on Friday, press secretary Dmitry Peskov warned that deploying nuclear weapons there would represent a "very serious" escalation and said Lithuania would come "under the sights of Russia’s nuclear weapons" if Western weapons were ever stationed there.

Vilnius’ response basically was, "So what?"

Speaking to Lithuania’s public service broadcaster LRT, Lithuanian Defense Minister Robertas Kaunas deadpanned, "Moscow probably simply forgot to mention that Lithuania, like all other NATO states, is already Russia's target." He went on to dismiss Peskov’s threat as an "intimidation that has nothing to do with reality."

Such a response would’ve been almost impossible to imagine in the wake of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Four years ago, Moscow's nuclear arsenal had enormous value because nobody needed to know where Putin's real threshold lay; Western governments simply needed to worry that they might stumble over the line accidentally.

Joe Biden ruled out sending U.S. forces into Ukraine almost immediately for precisely this reason. "Direct confrontation between NATO and Russia is World War III," he said in March 2022.

Meanwhile, Russian forces were able to solidify their gains while some of the most consequential weapons systems for Ukraine—tanks, F-16 fighter jets, tactical missiles, long-range strike weapons and air defense systems—were drip-fed to Kyiv over several years, held up by arguments over what might provoke Moscow.

Russian military expert Keir Giles put it plainly in a 2023 Chatham House study.

"Russia has achieved substantial success in constraining Western support for Ukraine" through nuclear intimidation. Western fears of escalation, he argued, had shown Moscow that nuclear threats could work even when they were implausible.

In other words, Russia’s tactic worked. Perhaps a bit too well.

Threats of nuclear Armageddon were deployed by Russian officials and media personalities at every turn, but the consequences routinely failed to arrive. Slowly but surely, the world learned that not every warning was to be believed.

Finland is a perfect case in point.

Few countries have a more developed understanding of the Russian military threat. Finland fought the Soviet invasion in the Winter War of 1939-1940 and, despite sharing an 830-mile-long border with Russia, spent the Cold War outside NATO. It remained militarily non-aligned for three decades after the Soviet Union collapsed.

Finland applied for NATO membership within three months and joined the alliance in April 2023. But Finnish law remained unusually restrictive on nuclear weapons. Importing a nuclear device, transporting it through Finland, supplying one or possessing one in the country were all prohibited.

In July, Helsinki completed the process Lithuania has just entered into, and removed all legal barriers preventing it from hosting nuclear weapons.

On Monday, Finland joined France’s "forward deterrence" initiative. The scheme allows partners to join nuclear-deterrence exercises and consultations and, at its furthest extent, temporarily host elements of France’s strategic nuclear forces. Germany, Poland, the Netherlands, Belgium, Greece, Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Britain are already working with Paris.

French President Emmanuel Macron launched the scheme to extend France’s nuclear umbrella on March 2, partially out of a growing fear that Europe can no longer assume the U.S.—particularly under Trump—will always provide the nuclear backstop that has underpinned European security since the Cold War.

But Putin has spent four-plus years demonstrating why Europe might need more protection in the first place. Now, he has overused the nuclear threat to such an extent that his neighbors are increasingly finding the courage to call his bluff.

In September 2022, Russian forces were being routed around Kharkiv and coming under severe pressure in Kherson. Putin warned that Russia would use "all weapon systems available" to defend itself.

"This is not a bluff," he declared. For once, it may not have been.

George Perkovich, a nuclear deterrence expert and senior fellow in the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace's Nuclear Policy Program, identifies September-October 2022 as the one period of the war in which Russia’s nuclear warnings constituted a genuine, urgent threat.

Intercepted Russian military communications indicated senior officers were discussing possible nuclear use, and U.S. intelligence secretly warned Joe Biden that, under an extreme scenario in which Russian lines collapsed and Moscow’s control of Crimea was threatened, the probability of Putin resorting to nuclear use was a coin flip.

The safety rails are thinner now, too. Russia broadened its nuclear doctrine in November 2024, expanding the circumstances in which it could consider using the bomb. New START—the last treaty imposing legally binding limits on U.S. and Russian strategic nuclear arsenals—expired on February 5. For the first time in more than half a century, the two countries are operating without legally binding limits on those arsenals.

If Putin concludes that threatening speeches and prickly statements issued via the media and other government officials are no longer enough to influence Western governments, he may well conclude that he needs a stronger signal.

The list of potential moves is long: an unusual nuclear exercise, raised alert levels, conspicuous dispersal of nuclear-capable forces or, most seriously, warheads being moved out of secure storage toward their delivery systems. Those are the kinds of physical preparations that should make everyone think twice.

But after more than four years of crossing Russian red lines, only to watch Moscow erase and redraw them further back, Western governments are getting better at telling the difference between Putin’s nuclear theater and a genuine nuclear threat.

The most powerful nuclear bomb is the one that Putin can detonate in his adversary’s imagination. At least no one is pressing the imaginary red button for him.