Putin's Ballistic Tantrum: A Coward's Fear On Display
In what appears to be the first combat use of a long-range ballistic missile usually reserved for nuclear strikes, Putin revealed the weak hand that he's trying to bluff with.
I decided to do a quick update now rather than cover the latest ruscist escalation in my weekly overview because I’m working on an analysis of Ukraine’s ongoing military reboot. It’s set to be fairly long, and I don’t want to cram too much into one post so that anyone who prefers to read in their email client can.
But Putin’s decision to launch a missile with intercontinental capabilities against Dnipro last night was highly instructive. The emerging footage is spectacular and understandably frightening.
Putin just deliberately demonstrated to the world what the start of a nuclear attack would look like. Until the warheads from what is claimed to be a Rubezh nuclear-capable intermediate-range ballistic missile struck, no one could know for sure if the warhead would be conventional or nuclear.
These inbound shots are pretty clearly coming down from beyond the atmosphere because the heat of re-entry leaves the payload rather glowy. The missile delivered six re-entry vehicles, each splitting into half a dozen smaller submunitions that are reported to be iron rods. There appears to be limited damage on the ground despite the light show, which is to be expected of a demonstration.
The inaccuracy of the attack is noteworthy: most missiles meant to carry a nuclear warhead can substitute a dummy or even conventional payload, but since you usually only need to get a nuke within a couple hundred meters, conventional warheads don’t mesh as well. It’s a waste to use such a big booster, with the primary advantage of a heavy missile falling from low orbit being it being so difficult if not impossible to effectively intercept.
But if all you want to do is spread terror and scare Europeans into worrying that Moscow might do this to their cities, it gets the job done. This was not a military strike in the classic sense, but a strategic demonstration. I’m only surprised that Putin hasn’t tried something like it before. It could well be that even he understands just how weak this actually proves him to be.
Since Moscow’s invasion faltered in 2022, the prospect of nuclear escalation has always hung over the Ukraine War. As is the case with D.C., Moscow’s nuclear doctrine has never been quite what it seems. Both have repeatedly either implied the possibility of nuclear escalation or actually threatened it on multiple occasions over the past eight decades - including against non-nuclear powers. Ellsberg, Kaplan, and Schlosser, have all documented the hidden history of American nuclear policy.
Anyone who has studied Muscovite military thought is aware that in situations where battlefield defeat appear inevitable, Moscow has always reserved the right to use nuclear weapons in a bid to freeze the fighting by threatening all-out apocalypse. This is all part of the head game that all nuclear powers play. In reality, the moment nukes start popping off leaders’ own lives are on the line. They don’t like that, and so have come to use the threat of nuclear escalation as a way to communicate now we’re really, really angry!
Britain has a similar provision in its own nuclear doctrine. France maintains a full nuclear triad despite having a fairly small arsenal for the same reason.
But ever actually crossing that line will send a powerful signal, one with potentially unpredictable consequences, mostly through misperception and panic. So even though Ukraine inflicted a defeat on Moscow in 2022 that was a textbook case where escalate-to-deescalate should have been applied, thankfully it was not.
Both sides want the other to believe that they’ll fight a nuclear war, and so in late 2022, when the CIA sincerely believed (as did I) that nuclear use was a real possibility, the US began talking a big game about direct intervention if Putin went that far, something all but guaranteed to trigger a nuclear response given Putin’s military weakness. That, of course, read like the bluff it was, and Putin was satisfied. His propagandists had started talking about using nukes and wiping out European capitals precisely to create the illusion that he might actually be thinking about going there. Once he knew that the mere threat of nuclear escalation would provoke an immediate effort to avoid giving Putin any excuse to follow through, he was golden.
All he did yesterday was take the next logical, halting step. He’s saying I might really! You can’t know! In doing so he reveals his own fears.
Postmodern thought has been ingrained so deep into the consciousness of most Western-educated minds that it seems only natural to negotiate in a bid to avoid apocalypse under these circumstances. Anyone who warns that it is necessary to refuse to be held hostage is easily cast as a hawk willing to risk lives for no good reason. Putin and his allies are bound to mash this button over and over again.
After threatening unspecified severe consequences if Ukraine’s partners finally allowed the short-range ballistic and cruise missiles it has to be used on russian soil, Putin had to do something once the ATACMS and Storm Shadow hits began. So the discount tsar pulled one of his favorite tricks: doing something flashy enough to draw global attention using an asset that Western scholars insist is strategic and therefore magic and special.
Already the clowns who tell foreign desk editors at CNN and BBC what is acceptable to believe about foreign policy matters are hard at work insisting that Putin didn’t actually use an ICBM, as Ukraine claims, implying that this makes an important difference. If it was technically an intermediate range ballistic missile (IRBM) and not one with true intercontinental capabilities (ICBM), we’re at a different level of escalation, see?
Anyone who understands scale, distance, or anything else you need to comprehend maps immediately spots the issue with making arbitrary distinctions based on range. Ukraine and russia are on the same continent, and the Iskanders and Kalibrs which routinely bombard Ukraine are as capable of carrying a nuclear warhead as a larger missile. Alaska is just across the Bering Strait from Kamchatka, but if you nuked it with an Iskander the effect would be most strategic indeed. The strategic/tactical distinction only makes sense when you’re talking about classes of targets: ones that immediately support battlefield activities or those which cover logistics, admin, training, and all that good stuff.
Western leaders don’t like to admit that their habit of cozily categorizing the world is not binding on anything in real life. Just as winning points in a debate doesn’t always mean the leading position is actually closer to the material truth, controlling the narrative about what a signal means risks inducing the exact sort of bias into calculations that can lead to an accident.
Every action in a war is intended to transmit a signal. The goal is to convince the other side that resistance isn’t worth it. In the worst wars, the message is only received when overwhelming material evidence of insufficient capability has been displayed. That’s where Ukraine is at: Putin will keep coming so long as he lives - and a successor might well mirror his vain ambition - so you can ink all the ceasefire deals you want, but they won’t matter. They’re only signed in the first place because each side believes a pause will be to their advantage.
This isn’t to say that negotiations shouldn’t take place - in fact, I support world leaders talking to Putin. Every channel of communication offers the potential for achieving useful effects or gleaning important information provided you always remain aware that no signal comes naked - that is, there’s always some motive behind transmission to account for. That’s not always a bad thing - but when dealing with someone like Putin, it can never be forgotten. Even simple communication is a game to him. But this can be turned around on him.
Putin, for example, seeks to force Ukraine’s partners into making side deals behind Ukraine’s back. This undermines Ukraine’s claim to be a legitimate and distinct nation instead of a bunch of misguided “little russians” driven to go rogue by corrupt Western ways.
The real reason that a nuclear attack on Ukraine has always been a very real option for Putin is that he knows this will almost certainly force his enemies to negotiate. Nuclear war has been built up into a grand cosmic apocalypse in the public mind, a mirror of how Japanese trauma from losing two cities to American atomic bombs spawned the Godzilla series. Western politicians will do almost anything to avoid a nuclear weapon being used anywhere because this would force them to act as if the world was ending.
The consequences of this are deeply unpredictable: their vaunted veneer of unity would certainly crumble away, which could trigger all kinds of strange reactions. That this might not matter in the end or even turn out to be a healthy thing is beyond the ken of a responsible status-quo preserving Western politician or bureaucrat. Their response is mounted across two fronts: on one hand they do everything possible not to give Putin an excuse to push to the next level of bluff, and on the other they insist that a nuclear attack would demand a dramatic escalatory response - thus making it impossible to conceive.
That, even beyond electoral politics in the USA, is the core reason why Ukraine has been fed aid in dribs and drabs for nearly three years. That behavior has become a self-reinforcing excuse: we think we’re controlling Putin because he doesn’t escalate, but in reality all we’re doing is postponing the inevitable.
If Putin ever does use a nuclear weapon in Ukraine, he’s not going to level a city or even strike the battlefield. He will have every incentive to conduct one or more demonstrations in a bid to make his enemies concede before he has to take any real risk. He knows full well that, just as they’re doing now by worrying in public about whether Putin used a strategic or less-than-strategic missile, when push comes to shove the Western foreign policy establishment will always fight to characterize anything Putin does as falling just below the threshold where a meaningful kinetic response will be required.
By using a missile that could otherwise strike anywhere in Europe and much of USA, Putin just delivered a calibrated, focused response to Biden authorizing ATACMS use inside russia. He wants every politician to watch the video footage of half a dozen warheads splitting into clusters of inert submunitions and think what if that happens here?
Their immediate instinct to seize control of the narrative in a way that downplays the message in public suggests that they have yet to comprehend his tactics or develop and effective counter. Note that despite Ukraine literally invading russia and holding its ground for months, the vaunted ruscist military having to trade almost two thousand bodies for a few square kilometers of territory with limited value to Ukraine at this stage of the war, Putin still hasn’t conducted even a nuclear test, only demonstrated that he’s ready to go there.
My standing prediction for over two years has been that if Putin does use a nuke in Ukraine, it will burst high above Kyiv or some other city - much too high to do any serious damage. Could be that fear of this is what made the US and other countries to close their embassies in Kyiv the other day. Moscow likely telegraphed that this attack was coming, and I wouldn’t be surprised if someone in D.C. thinks it’s a win that Putin bombed Dnipro and not Kyiv. But nobody could be sure that a high-altitude nuclear blast wouldn’t be on the other end of the launch.
In that scenario there would likely be no ground casualties except from broken glass as a result of the shockwave. Probably some people blinded because they were staring up at the sky when the bomb went off. But there are plenty of pictures of people standing underneath Cold War era atmospheric tests, and one of the bigger tests the US conducted in the South Pacific was visible from Hawai’i
What Putin just did is demonstrate that he can order something like this at any time. This is nuclear terrorism, plain and simple. The odds of something worse happening go up the weaker the international response is.
As I’ve laid out before, Putin has not gone nuclear yet solely because of what this could do to his relationship with China. Beijing’s first priority will always be its own affairs, which require a degree of international economic stability that is not served in any way by a nuclear conflict. Showing that the USA will always abandon any ally if there’s a real risk of nuclear war is absolutely a Chinese objective in Ukraine. Watching Beijing’s most ancient and dangerous enemy kill itself in Ukraine is just another bonus.
But if a public freakout in the West begins after Putin conducts even a zero-casualty attack he calls a test or demonstration, China’s interests would swiftly suffer. A dramatic tightening of sanctions and their enforcement is at least the bare minimum Western capitols would likely do. Beijing would find itself in a position where cutting its partner loose was the only option, preferring to leave its opponents stuck dealing with russia rather than risk getting burned by Moscow’s terminal collapse.
Basically, Putin doesn’t use his nukes not because he fears Western intervention, but because that really could leave him totally reliant on North Korea and Iran. Putin’s best hope now is to convince China that the time to impose a deal on the USA is now, when Trump is clearly willing to trade away Taiwanese security and will probably become obsessed with Iran thanks to Tehran’s alleged (and so far laughably weak) plot to kill him.
So what’s Putin’s natural option? Rattle that nuclear saber as hard as he can, launching missiles that can’t be intercepted at Ukraine and suggesting that Moscow will give away nuclear and missile technology.
If his forces were actually winning on the battlefield, as a whole lot of Western media appears determined to claim, Putin would never have to make a demonstration like this. Frankly, he’s visibly compensating for yet another total failure of the ruscist air defense system, which apparently knocked down just two of six or even eight ATACMS missiles fired at a depot in Bryansk. Storm Shadows slipped right through the orc air defense net in Kursk.
It’s becoming galling, frankly, to see so many journalists and commentators basically carry water for the Kremlin by parroting the line that Ukraine is exhausted, the war is a stalemate, and Moscow’s has limitless resources. But count up the military assets sitting around in global inventories, look at how shell production has ramped up and production of modern vehicles in Ukraine is beginning. Ukrainian troops are battle-hardened and learning how to use drones to maximum effect.
Is everything great? Hell no. Ukraine is still struggling on so many fronts, but first and foremost with the simple bureaucratic inertia that stifles progress on nearly every critical public policy issue across the developed world. And it all stems from a mix of rank cowardice and refusal to confront the situation as it stands.
For all intents and purposes, Zaluzhnyi is right: World War Three has begun. Nobody sane should want this, and I would love, love, love to never feel an obligation to witness the tragic end of so many lives ever again.
But there is now sufficient evidence to suggest that patterns evident across history are emerging once more. Little blazes have ignited that are beginning to merge like a West Coast wildfire. Linear responses to exponential institutional decay only make matters worse.
I know this is a unpopular stance to take, and anyone who does is apt to be labeled a callous warmonger, but the truth is that it’s long past time for everyone living in a democratic country to understand that we’re all at war with Putin’s ruscist empire. It’s a malignant cancer that’s going to keep attacking because it can’t do anything else. One of the biggest reasons why Hitler could not be stopped without a global war is that every time reason suggested that he would finally stop, he just kept on going.
It’s time to set aside all fears of nuclear war and accept that it’s only decisive action now that will prevent it from happening. Eventually Putin will be backed into a corner. As he gets older, he might even actually go insane and not care if he takes down everyone with him. Western leaders think they have control if they cite some definitions and send the right signals. They still imagine that Putin is their peer.
He’ll teach them their error, if given the chance. Hopefully this incident will wake up the doubters to the urgency of Ukraine’s fight - and how close victory actually is.
This is not the behavior of a power that holds the upper hand. And even if Putin were to play this game in a NATO country, that wouldn’t end well for him. That needs to be proven through a radical embrace of Ukraine’s defense as our own too.
See, every missile that Putin has now and the factories he needs to make more, his enemies could actually wipe out in a conventional war if they had a mind to. Make no mistake: Putin reacted this way because Ukraine’s successful use of ATACMS and Storm Shadow missiles inside of russia once again proved just how weak he has become.
The correct response to Putin’s tantrum is that’s all you’ve got, guy? There are rumors that a high-ranking general was killed in Kursk while meeting with a North Korean counterpart. Even if that didn’t happen, it will sooner or later. Even if Ukraine’s inventory is only in the dozens, Moscow’s air defenses are now scattered by incessant drone raids that are getting stronger every month. Some high-end will always get through if joined by a wave of smaller drones.
Putin is on track to lose his war. He’s visibly afraid. And so he’s lashing out - and in doing so, proving his own vulnerability.
Yes, Moscow has lots of nukes to put on its missiles. But thing is, just up the freeway from me is a base with enough submarine-based nuclear hate to exterminate the whole russian world several times over. It only takes one to end him. Or better yet, a simple drone.
And what happens if Putin dies tomorrow? Do his cronies blow up the world and swiftly join their fearless leader to dine in Hel’s dreary halls until the death of time?
Not a chance. Oligarchs don’t build wealth to die defending it. That’s for the ordinary folks sent to the trenches.
The odds of all-out nuclear war are about as high as the Democrats who called Trump a fascist and the death of liberal democracy around a month ago picking up guns and launching a civil war. Putin’s orcs talk a big game about being tough and inscrutable to outsiders, but just like too many Americans, they’re simply cowards preying on the gullible.
No bully will ever take a single step back until they receive a fist to the throat or boot to the groin. Yes, they can inflict pain too. There are always cost to bear. But the only solution to blackmail is to call the bluff that sustains it. There are no red lines with Putin’s russia, only consequences.