With Nuclear Threats, Putin Plays the West Like a Fiddle

Excerpt

In June 2016, Russian President Vladimir Putin warned of a “growing barrage of information attacks unleashed against Russia,” one of numerous times the Kremlin has accused the West of engaging in psychological mind games. In fact, it is the West that has let itself be manipulated by the Kremlin’s calibrated influence operations. Among these, Putin’s most effective tactic has been to use nuclear blackmail to play on Western fears of escalating the war in Ukraine. He has repeatedly used this tactic to successfully deter the West from scaling up military aid to Ukraine, providing new types of weapons, and fully backing Kyiv’s victory over Moscow.

These manipulations mirror the old Soviet technique of reflexive control, which refers to a sustained campaign of feeding an opponent information that has been crafted to push that opponent to act, out of its own volition, in the Kremlin’s interest. In the context of Russia’s war to subjugate Ukraine, Putin knows that nothing better pushes the West’s buttons than threats of nuclear escalation.

David R. Shedd, is a former acting director of the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency and Ivana Stradner, is a research fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Follow her on X @ivanastradner. FDD is a Washington, DC-based, nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.