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Does anyone else ever watch/listen to Glenn Diesen's "The Greater Eurasia Podcast"? The tone of the show is rather dry and boring but many of his guests seem to talk about Europe getting nuked like it is as inevitable as the weather forecast.
I am no geopolitical expert by any means so my first reaction was that this was just a tactic to kick Europe/NATO into action to better defend itself against Russia, but one of the main guests proposing the nukes is Stanislav Krapivnik, (who sometimes seems slightly drunk in my opinion,) and apparently is on Russia's side in the Ukraine conflict. Since that's the case I suppose he might be exaggerating Russia's power boastfully or trying to instill fear into the West but he is not the only guest who seems to treat nuclear action as an inevitability. And it is not that Russia would nuke Ukraine, but rather they mention targets like Germany or Finland or other NATO nations.
Can I get a sanity check on this? Does anyone on this board share the view that Russia is going to use nuclear weapons on Europe in the next year or two?
I think it is highly unlikely that Russia uses nuclear weapons on any targets. That being said, if Russia were to use nukes, it would almost certainly be on European targets, with Ukraine at the top of the list. Aside from the tactical considerations, from a threat management perspective there are a) only two European countries with credible nuclear deterrants at all, and frankly neither of them are particularly impressive (France- 4 SSBNs, 1 at sea at all times, and a couple of airbases with Rafales capable of air-launched nuclear cruise missiles; UK- 4 SSBNs, 1 at sea at all times; 4 well-timed strikes could theoretically eliminate all available European deterrance) b) its a lot easier and a lot more immediately valuable to hit targets in Europe if Putin does decide to sling nukes.
That being said, I'm pretty sure this would be a suicide ploy, as the US would likely decide the world order cannot continue with Putin and cronies in charge, and remove him by any means necessary- including ICBM or cruise missile strikes. In a mutual nuclear exchange, Russia loses very badly, possibly to the point of landing zero-one hits on the continental US while suffering functional annihilation in return.
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I think it’s always been a lot more likely than people think. Nixon, Bush, Golda Meir, Kruschev and DeGaul all got close to using them at one time or another. Someone will eventually unless God keeps stopping it.
Now with respect to this current conflict I don’t think it’s likely. I think your best bet at seeing mushroom clouds was in summer of 2022, when for a minute in looked like an entire 60,000 man Russian army group was going to be encircled and destroyed. Other than that one which is already past, I think there are two potential scenarios.
The second is that Putin uses nukes offensively to win the war quicker. I don’t think that’s very likely because Putin is already winning the war, if slowly. Even if the Russian economy really was about to shit itself and die, and extreme measures had to be taken, I think there are probably several alternate extreme measures he could take instead. Like a full wartime mobilization and draft. Or conventional strikes on Polish rail terminals. Or loudly declaring victory on Twitter and going home.
The third option is that I chug an entire Mountain Dew Baja Blast and we switch over into the Call of Duty Modern Warfare II timeline, and it turns out Ukraine was just a prolog to a full scale Russian invasion of Europe. Obviously that could lead to a nuclear war but there would be many, many intervening steps that would have to happen and it would probably take years.
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No, I don’t know this guy.
I don’t think nukes are likely, either. This is more likely a strong filter bubble.
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Never heard of that podcast either.
I try to make an effort to understand Russia's point of view enough to get an idea of why they think it's necessary to fight this war, and why they have shown such dogged persistence in it despite disappointing results of their opening moves and staggering casualty counts. I still can't see how they would think it's a good idea to start throwing nukes around now, especially at the other European powers. It seems to me like it would read to a lot of people as an admission that they are unable to achieve a result they consider favorable on the battlefield with conventional weapons, which isn't going to be much of a plus for their standing in the region. I also find it unlikely that there are any good targets in Europe for "tactical" nuclear weapons right now. It seems highly likely to me that any use of nuclear weapons against formally uninvolved NATO nations at this point would escalate to strategic use exactly as fast as pretty much everyone has always expected. I suppose there's no way to know what might change in the next year, but it's hard to imagine what could happen that would change that.
So yeah, I think it's just Russia supporters being all butthurt that they haven't been doing all that hot.
I don’t think your picturing it right. It wouldn’t be nuclear strikes on NATO. It would be tactical strikes on various hard points in Ukraine, with the aim of collapsing the Ukrainian army in a matter of days, not years. Then the Russians would wait and observe to see what kind of response there is, which could range from “nothing” to “limited nuclear strikes on Russian soil”. That said I don’t think it’s likely, I will explain above.
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At this point I think it's probably closest to:
The only ones interested in nuclear escalation in this picture are the armchair warriors (mostly ignorant/uncaring about consequences and just wanting to feel good about the Russian bear going apeshit, not unlike some who think USA should just glass Middle East until goals are achieved) and the rank and file soldiers (who'd rather Ukraine get nuked than have to lay down their lives for it any further). Consequentially they are getting very angry at Putin who pursues the image of "denazificator" (as opposed to "stone them into the bomb age") and the other power centers who pursue money handouts for building nationalized social media apps and the like.
I agree about the armchair warriors bit. I do think their motivation for the war is much deeper and more fundamental and not really like Putin thought he could grab Ukraine all quick and easy and is now in over his head. Instead, I think the entire Russian power structure is existentially petrified of invasion from the West. It's all long memories about how horrifying Operation Barbarossa was to be on the receiving end of - this also fits in with how they talk about "denazifying" Ukraine. This is why they're willing to make incredible sacrifices to ensure that Ukraine remains in their sphere of influence. That also explains how there doesn't seem to be all that much discontent in Russia about how this war is going. I'm not super confident in my ability to determine exactly how much unrest there really is in Russia, but I would have expected to see more signs of it with how much of a grind this war seems to be for them.
On the IT side, I also discovered the Ukrainian scam call center thing - big article about it in Russian, Google Translate works pretty well. Apparently there's a ton of these call centers actively working to scam random Russians out of money and blackmail them into committing various petty, and maybe sometimes not so petty, crimes. Thinking from the Ukrainian side, it's understandable that they'd lean into that sort of thing and attempt to integrate it with their formal intelligence agencies to gain an asymmetric advantage when so many things are stacked against them. But then from the Russian side, that is a much more reasonable explanation for why they're cracking down so hard on the communication and messaging systems.
That sounds awfully…charitable.
What advantage does the cultural trauma theory have?
Accusing your enemies of Nazism is a proud tradition in and out of Russia, so you’d expect to see it whether or not the leadership were motivated by such.
Moving your borders closer to NATO does not suggest a fear of invasion. Neither does draining your manpower and weapon stockpiles. Both of those things are more compatible with the five-minute adventure theory, though.
Creating a geographical buffer between your enemies and your core is absolutely valid strategy, even if it costs some -- what it's worth is another question of course.
My current operating model is that Russia and China are both still playing "Great Game" diplomacy, in which military wargame type considerations have a voice at the table -- most of the West is definitely not, with the US being an exception in that it's torn between Deep State 5-d chess and Fukuyama-flavoured quokka-ism.
Hold on.
I agree that Russia feared NATO expansion into Ukraine. I would say that is adequately explained by the “five-minute adventure” model: if Russia thought the cost would be really low, the benefit of a puppet buffer would be easily worth it. Now that the cost is sunk, Russia doesn’t want to back down, because now it definitely gets a hostile neighbor.
What it doesn’t offer is any reason to prefer the cultural trauma theory. I don’t find it reasonable to say having Ukraine as a neighbor was comparable to having the Nazis on the border. That sounds like a post-facto justification, and a pretty silly one.
What do you mean?
I mean that Ukraine is militarily important to Russia in a hypothetical war with tanks rolling (one way or another) through the Fulda Gap and nukes flying, so Russia prioritizes current actions to mitigate the risk of this (low probability) hypothetical. Similarly with China's policies on Tibet and/or Taiwan. (ie. they are mostly due to strategic considerations in the case of war with India or the US, rather than some deep ideological feeling that Tibet or even Taiwan ought to be Chinese)
Europe did this in the 19th century but doesn't anymore; the US kind of does it, but through puppets and diplomacy (plus CIA ops, probably) in far-flung places rather than in their own backyard.
If the US were thinking this way, they would absolutely be serious about military force in Canada (risk of becoming a Chinese puppet) and Greenland (risk of becoming a stepping stone for either China or Russia) -- I don't think Trumps ruminations on this come from the same place, it's more like trolling at this point.
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There is plenty of discontent in Russia about how the war is going, included among the opinion makers. It does not rise to unrest because unrest is outlawed and the law is enforced.
(The discontent among the opinion makers is, admittedly, primarily of the "we should be having this war but the leadership are thieves, morons and cowards" kind rather than "we shouldn't be having this war" kind because expressing discontent of the latter kind as a public person is extra no bueno.)
I do not believe Putin has memories of Operation Barbarossa, he wasn't there. Invocations of WW2 sentiments just sound extremely fake and contrived to me.
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IF Russia finds itself in a shooting war with NATO (regardless of who initiates it), I consider an "escalate to deescalate" scenario plausible. Russia has (by some estimates) a 10:1 advantage over NATO in substrategic nuclear weapons in the European theater. Many of these weapons are very small, deployed from artillery pieces or even air-to-air missiles.
I would stress that tactical nuclear weapons are very, very different from strategic nuclear weapons, and during the Cold War both sides would likely have used nuclear weapons "routinely" as substrategic weapons (for instance nuclear depth charges were intended to destroy an enemy submarine, not necessarily the entire Russian Baltic Fleet, or what have you). Generally speaking, the effects of these weapons would be along the lines of "destroy an airbase" not "obliterate Berlin." However, the current gap in NATO/Russian tactical nuclear capabilities is important because it limits the ability to play tit-for-tat if Russia uses tactical nuclear weapons, either as part of an escalate-to-deescalate gambit or simply because they are effective. If you've got 10 tactical nuclear weapons for every 1 of theirs, they are going to run out of tactical nuclear weapons long before you do. So once you've both nuked each other a few times and they run out, they have two options: accept you nuking them routinely (which greatly enhances the effectiveness of your weapons systems) or escalate to strategic nuclear weapons, with the larger stakes and (literal) fallout that entails.
Now, modern nuclear weapons are smaller and often have "dial a yield" capabilities that makes the lines a bit blurrier than that, but hopefully that gives you a good idea of why people might believe Russia would resort to nuclear weapons: militarily, nuclear weapons are very effective, even if they are "small." Politically, if you have the upper hand and the deeper stockpiles, you have good reason to believe that you can extract concessions from a foe who will be unwilling to race you up the escalation ladder to tossing ICBMs at each other.
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I've never heard of Stanislav Krapivnik. Posturing that Russia should nuke "the ones behind Ukraine" is a common pastime of some of the pro-Russian media people and is not serious IMO.
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