Nuclear war could be Putin’s only option

The global political climate has changed immeasurably during president Trump’s 100 days in office. Russia has changed little during president Putin’s 25 years in control, and his celebratory anniversary documentary released on State TV channels at the weekend has some worrying comments and suggestions which we in the West must take very seriously.

Putin says the plans and aims for his Special Military Operation to subjugate Ukraine will not change and he intends to see them through, but he hopes he does not have to use “nuclear weapons.”

I have written many times about the ridiculousness of Putin’s almost weekly threat of nuclear attack on the West and Ukraine in the last 3 years, and I have dismissed them all as bluff and bluster. His aim is to keep the “timid” Europeans out of the fight and to focus president Trump on easier business deals than in Ukraine. This has hitherto worked.

However, the situation for Putin has changed in the last few weeks in almost every facet to do with his war on Ukraine. He thought that after Trump admonished president Zelensky in the White House a few months ago, Ukraine was his for the taking. Now this could not be further from reality, so his latest threat to annihilate Ukraine is possibly serious and must be unpacked to understand how to prevent it.

Recent figures have put Russian losses, dead and wounded, as ghosting close to 1 million men. Detailed analysis recently has shown that Russia has made scant progress in the last 12 months and moved the frontlines little. Sure, they recovered much of Kursk, but had to do it with massive help from North Korea and the majority of those 10,000 troops are now dead or gone. Even Russia cannot sustain these levels of losses.

It had been able to replace tanks and other military kit by putting its industrial military output on a war footing, funded by its vast exports of hydrocarbons with prices inflated by this war. However, OPEC is increasing production, and the most powerful oil state, Saudi Arabia, wants the price at $50 per barrel. At current spending levels, this will soon bankrupt Moscow

The Russian newspapers are full of the impending economic crash and claim utility bills are going to increase by up to 40 per cent in the next couple of years. With inflation already rampant, most Russians are soon going to struggle to heat their homes or even eat.

Against this backdrop it is not difficult to arrive at the assessment that the only way Putin can achieve his aims in Ukraine is to use his tactical nuclear weapons to quickly defeat the Ukraine armed forces, as he assumes that the two European nuclear nations, the UK and France, would not retaliate with their strategic nuclear weapons.

In order to take this option out of Putin’s armoury we need to ensure that Nato would retaliate with ideally overwhelming conventional force or tactical nuclear weapons, and this will have to come, mostly, from the US. There are plans to once again position US tactical nuclear weapons in the UK and this should be done with some urgency, and Trump must flex his very considerable conventional military muscle.

Nuclear equilibrium has prevented WW3 for 75 years, but nobody considered a tyrant like Putin would risk using a “small” nuclear weapon to achieve his evil aims for Ukraine. But he clearly is, and we must “checkmate” him by a “show” of conventional force and restoring the nuclear weapons equilibrium in Europe.

Lest we forget that when Putin looked west on February 24 2022, he did not see a conventional military deterrence to stop him. When he looks west today, he sees a “slightly” unbalanced nuclear deterrence and a country preparing to counter anything he might throw at them, which might be just enough to stop him and bring him to the peace negotiation table.