ruSSian Nuke threats are part of a targeted manipulation strategy.
Emmanuel Macron’s recent comment that France would not, if Russia uses nuclear weapons, retaliate with its own has caused a diplomatic kerfuffle in the Atlantic Alliance. Defence Secretary Ben Wallace has claimed Macron “revealed his hand”, thereby weakening the ambiguity that Western...
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“This is not, however, crude brinksmanship. Central to Russian strategy is Reflexive Control, a sophisticated theory of psychological manipulation within a long Soviet/Russian tradition of ‘Active Measures’. Reflexive Control plays to the
fear, greed and
self-regard of the target, tailoring threats, offers and blandishments to an adversary’s psychological-emotional-intellectual pressure points. Fear of nukes, greed for cheap gas, and an accompanying plausible, and clever rationale that seduces Western polities to reflexively go along with its own atavistic, instinctive leanings. And all the better if some credible Western voices can parrot the Kremlin’s lines.
Russia must employ Reflexive Control to win informationally because it is losing on the battlefield. Putin’s war has gone badly wrong. Diagnoses of strategic stalemate, so popular in the summer, have fallen flat. Ukraine’s Kharkiv and Kherson offensives retook thousands of square-miles from Russia, retaking Kherson itself is now a probability. Ukraine has severely damaged the Kerch Bridge, at once the crucial logistical link for Russian forces in southern Ukraine and a symbol of Putin’s imperial power. Mobilisation will not help: all the evidence indicates that Russia’s new soldiers are poorly trained and equipped, have low morale, and in many cases have little stomach to fight the committed Ukrainians. Putin is losing the war on the ground.
Years of informational preparation undergird Putin’s nuclear threats. The Russian military integrates nuclear use into its major exercises – indeed, three separate nuclear related events accompanied February’s invasion to remind the West of Russia’s nuclear menace and to keep out of it. Ever since, Russian military theorists and Western defence analysts have emphasised Moscow’s willingness to use low-yield ‘battlefield’ nuclear weapons in a range of circumstances. “Escalate-to-deescalate” has entered the popular lexicon.”
