Putin’s nuclear blackmail is over

For more than three years, Russian President Vladimir Putin has used nuclear threats as his weapon against Western support for Ukraine. Battlefield setbacks? Listen to warnings about “red lines” and World War III.

And it worked. The Biden administration’s cautious and gradual approach to military aid has been shaped in part by the fear of crossing Putin’s threshold.

But things have changed. Not only did Putin’s nuclear theater fail to intimidate President Trump, it backfired so badly that the Kremlin was forced to walk back its threats. In fact, this may be the moment when Putin’s nuclear blackmail finally reaches its expiration date.

This pattern has been consistent since 2022. When Ukrainian forces defeated Russian forces in Kharkiv and Kherson that fall, Moscow’s threat to use nuclear weapons was so alarming that CIA Director Bill Burns later revealed there was a “real risk” of tactical nuclear use. Every time the West considered supplying advanced weapons, Russia issued dire warnings, which the Biden administration took seriously.

Trump initially fell into the same playbook. Over the course of nine months, Putin convinced him that a Russian victory was inevitable, while forcing him to remain on the peace negotiating stage. Vice President J.D. Vance explicitly warned against provoking World War III. Trump has postponed major sanctions, sincerely believing that restraint will bring peace.

But by October, the illusion had diminished. A phone call with Putin on October 16 ended with Trump announcing plans to hold a summit in Budapest to discuss the settlement. Days later, after Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov delivered the same tough ultimatum to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Trump pulled the plug. Days later, out of frustration and determined to force Putin to negotiate seriously, Trump imposed his first major sanctions on the giant Russian oil companies Rosneft and Lukoil.

Russia’s response? It seemed a dramatic pivot more desperate than strategic. With conventional diplomacy getting nowhere, Moscow returned to the nuclear theater, but this time with an absurd twist.

First: Burevestnik, a nuclear-powered cruise missile, which Putin announced on October 26-27. Then the messages took a more bizarre turn. Putin sent Kirill Dmitriev, his economic envoy, who is not a member of the military apparatus, to Washington to brandish this “unique weapon.” Dmitriev appeared with chocolate pieces bearing quotes from Putin.

Reply? Treasury Secretary Scott Besent publicly mocked him on CBS News, calling Dmitriev a “Russian motherfucker.” When US Cabinet officials openly mock Russian envoys on national television, you lose more than just the argument; You have completely lost the psychological game.

Western experts did not believe it. Burevestnik is subsonic and full of technical problems. A 2019 test killed five Russian scientists. Trump’s return summed it up bluntly: “They know we have a nuclear submarine, the greatest in the world, right off their shores.” He’s talking about American submarines operating from Norway with missiles that could hit Moscow in five to seven minutes. The logic of developing such a system becomes questionable given the existing American deterrent power.

With the failure of Burevestnik’s gambit, Putin redoubled his efforts. On October 29, he launched the Poseidon torpedo, which was supposedly capable of creating radioactive tsunami waves 500 meters high that would destroy American coastal cities.

Technical experts reject this as implausible. Underwater nuclear explosions spread energy in all directions. Generating a towering, concentrated tsunami hundreds of meters high, as Russia claims Poseidon is capable of, would require not only massive force, but geological conditions that nuclear weapons cannot simulate. Physics doesn’t support that.

That’s when things unfolded. Trump misread what Russia was actually experiencing. Poseidon and Borevestnik use nuclear-powered engines, not nuclear warheads. On October 30, Trump announced that he would order the Pentagon to resume nuclear weapons testing, something it has not done since 1992.

The Kremlin’s strategy has backfired. His spokesman Dmitry Peskov was quick to clarify that the Russian tests were not of warheads but of engines, a tacit admission that their positions had provoked the wrong reaction. A tactic that once paralyzed Western decision-making now leads to the very escalation it sought to prevent.

This is not a one-time thing. Russia’s “wonder weapons” have a habit of failing. Take, for example, the T-14 Armata tank, which was unveiled in 2015. Russia planned to build 2,300 tanks. They manufactured fewer than 20 tanks, and exactly none were deployed in Ukraine, although they lost over 4,000 tanks in combat. Or the RS-28 Sarmat “Satan II” intercontinental ballistic missile, which has so far failed four consecutive tests. The September 2024 test left a 200-foot-deep crater where the launch site once stood. Putin admitted a few days ago that it still “has not yet been published.” Even the newer Oreshnik missile exists only in small numbers, and Ukraine has already destroyed one of the three known systems.

The pattern is clear: Putin’s nuclear blackmail relies on theatrical displays of weapons that are either ineffective, cannot be produced on a large scale, or barely exist outside of propaganda videos. When your top tank is never deployed, your missiles keep failing, and your economic emissaries demonstrate military technology, deterrence begins to look like theater.

Trump’s approach has been chaotic, perhaps reckless. But it was Putin’s trick. Trump did not care about Biden’s careful restraint. Putin reminded that America’s strategic superiority, especially in the field of nuclear deterrence, is indisputable. For once, the usual scare tactics didn’t work. They increasingly fail to intimidate the West into abandoning Ukraine and continue to hound American presidents with empty threats.

None of this means that nuclear risks have disappeared. But this means that Putin’s most trustworthy form – strategic intimidation disguised as ambiguity – is gone. He no longer has the same influence in Washington. More importantly, it no longer has the same audience.

When your nuclear intimidation ends with your spokesperson explaining that you are not actually testing nuclear weapons, you have lost ground. Putin’s nuclear blackmail appears to have reached its expiration date. What happens next depends on whether the Kremlin is able to adapt to dealing with a less predictable and less intimidating Washington.

Igor Desyatnikov is a US-based global strategist and fund manager, born in Ukraine, and trained in international security and political science from Harvard University.