The Russians say they believe they can use nukes on a conventional battlefield and get away with it.
Nice war if you can get it, to coin a phrase:
Russia believes it can introduce nuclear weapons into a conventional war without taking nuclear fire in return and that such action will result in a Russian military victory. This strategy is what the Russians call “de-escalation” of a war although a more accurate description would be “escalate to win.” In 2012, the Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) reiterated the "de-escalation" concept involving "a limited use of weapons, including precision weapons, in order to deescalate sources of tension and resolve the conflict situation on conditions favorable to Russia.” In 2017, then-DIA Director Lieutenant General Vincent Stewart stated, Russia is “the only country that I know of that has this concept of escalate to terminate or escalate to deescalate, but they do have that built into their operational concept, we've seen them exercise that idea and it's really kind of a dangerous idea…"[1] He also said that he had seen no evidence that this policy was changing.[2]
While this is scary, I suspect the Russians aren't moronic enough to believe they could get away with using nukes while their targets just shrug their shoulders and do nothing.
I believe the point of this image of reckless policy is to seem scary. The Russians have a history of that with their nukes:
This wouldn't be the first time that Russia bluffed about their nukes (from Kagan's On the Origins of War and the Preservation of Peace, p. 464):
At one point Khrushchev said that we built missiles like sausages. I said then, "How can you say that, since we have only two or three?" He said, "the important thing is to make the Americans believe that. And that way we prevent an attack." And on those grounds our entire policy was based. We threatened with missiles we didn't have. That happened in the Suez crisis, and the Iraqi crisis.
Because ultimately Russia's reliance on nuclear weapons is a sign of their conventional military weakness:
Lowering the threshold for Russian use of nuclear weapons is an admission of conventional military weakness. For all the unjustified hype about Russian "hybrid warfare" Russia has weak conventional military options against any but the weakest and closest opponents.
And the Russians are nuts to want to defend their territorial integrity with a policy that could just lead to nuclear strikes on Russia itself and escalate to their total destruction. The reality is that the only way this comes up against NATO is if Russia invades a NATO country and NATO counterattacks despite Russia claiming that their new conquest is suddenly part of Holy Mother Russia and a red line for nuclear weapons use.
That's rational?
My hope is that this reliance on nuclear weapons for territorial defense is actually directed against China which lost huge amounts of territory to Russia in the 19th century and Russia is just too afraid of China to admit that China is the real threat to Russian territorial integrity.
That's the scary aspect. Russia is too weak to admit that China is the main threat to Russia and take steps to repair relations with NATO which is too weak to threaten Russia and totally uninterested in doing that.
The Russians shouldn't be able to run with scissors.
Have a super sparkly day.
