Assuming that Russia did want to detonate a small nuclear weapon in Ukraine and succeeded in doing so, despite all of this, this would make no decisive military difference. There are no big clusters of Ukrainian soldiers or equipment to hit, since Ukraine fights in a very decentralized way. If there were a detonation, Ukrainians would keep fighting. They have been saying so for months, and there is no reason to doubt them.
There is also the problem of motive. Putin wants us to sympathize with his situation, which is of course a highly suspect move in itself. But is what he says even credible? We say that "Putin is backed to the wall. What will he do?" That is how we get ourselves talking about nuclear weapons: Putin gets us into what we are to supposed to believe is his own psychological space. But this is all just feeling. It is not really a motive.
If sheer emotion resulting from defeat was going to motivate nuclear use, it would already have happened, and it hasn't. Little can be more humiliating than the Russian defeat at Kyiv, a month into the war. The collapse in Kharkiv region last month was also a shock. As I write, the Ukrainians are making significant gains in regions that Putin just claimed would be Russia forever in a giant televised ceremony; the official Russian response has been to say that their borders are not defined. The Russian reaction to superior force has been to retreat.
So let us take a harder look at Putin's position. The Russian armed forces are not "backed against a wall" in Ukraine: they are safe if they retreat back to Russia. The "wall" metaphor is also not really helpful in seeing where Putin stands. It is more like the furniture has been moved around him, and he will have to get his bearings again.
What he has done in Ukraine has changed his position in Moscow, and for the worse. It does not follow from that, though, they he "must" win the war in Ukraine, whatever that means ("can" comes logically before "must"). Holding on to power in Moscow is what matters, and that does not necessarily mean exposing himself to further risk in Ukraine. Once (and if) Putin understands that the war is lost, he will adjust his thinking about his position at home.
Through the summer, that position was simpler. Until very recently, probably until he made the speech announcing mobilization in September, he could simply have declared victory on mass media, and most Russians would have been content. Now, however, he has brought his senseless war to the point where even the Russian information space is beginning to crack. Russians are anxious about the war now, thanks to mobilization (as opinion polls show). And now their television propagandists are admitting that Russian troops are retreating. So unlike the first half-year of the war, Putin cannot just claim that all is well and be done with it. He has to do something else.
The earth has moved under Putin's feet. His political career has been based on using controlled media to transform foreign policy into soothing spectacle. In other words: regime survival has depended upon two premises: what happens on television is more important than what happens in reality; and what happens abroad is more important than what happens at home. It seems to me that these premises no longer hold. With mobilization, the distinction between at home and abroad has been broken; with lost battles, the distinction between television and reality has been weakened. Reality is starting to matter more than television, and Russia will start to matter more than Ukraine.
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There is a cleft both in elite and public opinion in Russia, and it is now becoming visible on television. Some people think that the war is a holy cause and can be won if heads roll, leadership behaves honorably, and more men and materiel are sent to the front. Among them are the military bloggers who are actually at the front, and whose voices are becoming more mainstream. This is a trap for Putin, since he is already sending everything that he can. Those voices make him look weak. Other people think that the war was a mistake. These voices will make him look foolish. This is just the most basic of a number of contradictory positions that Putin now faces, from an exposed and weakened position.
If a war abroad is weakening your position, and if that war cannot be won, it is best to end it today rather than tomorrow. I would suspect that Putin does not yet see this. He has, however, come far enough to understood that he must act in the real world, though thus far his choices have not been good ones.
Mobilization was the worst of both worlds: big enough to alienate the population, too small and above all too late to make a difference before winter. It was probably the result of a compromise, which shows us that Putin is not ruling alone. Putin is trying to command the troops in Ukraine. His failures open him up to criticism (indirect, so far). But Putin seems to be stuck: just ending the war now, without the the subject changing, would strengthen some of his critics. But now that mobilization has already been tried, he has few means of applying greater force. So how does the subject change?
It is changing on its own. Putin is now trapped by an event that was supposed to be televisual and about a faraway place, but which has taken on an immediate political form inside Russia. Two prominent Russian political figures, Ramzan Kadyrov and Yevgeny Prigozhin, have criticized the Russian high command quite brutally. Given that everyone knows that Putin is doing the actual commanding, this has to be divisive. The Kremlin responded to Kadyrov directly, and army propaganda has been showing a criticized commander with his troops in the field.
Recruitment poster for Wagner, with Prigozhin portrayed as the great Russian Leader. The slogan on the death’s head patch is “Death is our business. Business is good.” One of the Wagner detachments is openly fascist.
By what I take to be no coincidence, both Kadyrov and Prigozhin control something like a private armed force. Kadyrov, the de facto dictator of Russia's Chechnya region, has his own militia. It was deployed to Ukraine, where it seemed to specialize in terrorizing civilians and instagramming itself. After pushing for mobilization in Russia last month, Kadyrov then announced that no one from Chechnya would be mobilized. One might conclude that he is saving his men for something else.
Prigozhin is the leader of the murky mercenary entity Wagner, and has been making himself more visible in that capacity. (He is also responsible for the Internet Research Agency, which was one of the actors in the hybrid war against Ukraine in 2014 and the cyberwars against Britain and the United States in 2016.) Wagner has been involved in a number of attempts at regime change, including blood purges of the Russian puppet governments in Luhansk and Donetsk regions, and the attempts to assassinate Volodymyr Zelens'kyi at the beginning of the war. These were at Putin's orders, no doubt. But it is an unnerving skill set.
Right now Wagner is leading the daily Russian attempts at offensives in the Bakhmut area of Donetsk region, which are not actually going anywhere. Wagner does not seem to be very active where the Ukrainians are advancing, which is rather more important. Yesterday Gulagu.net reported that a Wagner fighter shot a Russian army officer, which would seem to indicate that all is not well on that part of the front. Is it a stretch to suppose that Prigozhin is sparing whatever valuable men and material he has left? He has been openly recruiting Russian prisoners to fight for Wagner in Ukraine; I would venture the supposition that he is sending them to die and keeping back the men and equipment who might have a future in some other endeavor.
Prigozhin and Kadyrov are calling for is an intensification of the war, and mocking the Russian high command in the most aggressive possible tone, but meanwhile they seem to be protecting their own men. That too seems like a trap. By criticizing the way the war is fought, they weaken Putin's informational control; by forcing him to take responsibility even as they will not do so, they expose his position further. They are telling him to win a war that they do not, themselves, seem to be trying to win.
In the overall logic that I am describing, rivals would seek to conserve whatever fighting forces they have, either to protect their own personal interests during an unpredictable time, or to make a play for Moscow. If this is indeed the present situation, it will soon seem foolish for everyone involved to have armed forces located in distant Ukraine, or, for that matter, to get them killed there day after day. Then comes a tipping point. Once some people realize that other people are holding back their men, it will seem senseless to expend (or alienate) one's own.
At a certain moment, this logic applies to the Russian army itself. As Lawrence Freedman has pointed out, if the army wants to have a role in Russian politics or prestige in Russian society, its commanders have an incentive to pull back while they still have units to command. And if Putin himself wants to remain in power, neither a discredited nor a demoralized army is in his interest.
Mobilization itself starts to look like a spear pointed the wrong way: is there a point in sending thousands of unprepared and underequipped men into what they increasingly know is doom? Putin's presupposition, of course, is that mobilized soldiers will either die or win; but if they flee instead, they become a dangerous group, perhaps ready for another leader.
And so we can see a plausible scenario for how this war ends. War is a form of politics, and the Russian regime is altered by defeat. As Ukraine continues to win battles, one reversal is accompanied by another: the televisual yields to the real, and the Ukrainian campaign yields to a struggle for power in Russia. In such a struggle, it makes no sense to have armed allies far away in Ukraine who might be more usefully deployed in Russia: not necessarily in an armed conflict, although this cannot be ruled out entirely, but to deter others and protect oneself. For all of the actors concerned, it might be bad to lose in Ukraine, but it is worse to lose in Russia.
The logic of the situation favors he who realizes this most quickly, and is able to control and redeploy. Once the cascade begins, it quickly makes no sense for anyone to have any Russian forces in Ukraine at all. Again, from this it does not necessarily follow that there will be armed clashes in Russia: it is just that, as the instability created by the war in Ukraine comes home, Russian leaders who wish to gain from that instability, or protect themselves from it, will want their power centers close to Moscow. And this, of course, would be a very good thing, for Ukraine and for the world.
If this is what is coming, Putin will need no excuse to pull out from Ukraine, since he will be doing so for his own political survival. For all of his personal attachment to his odd ideas about Ukraine, I take it that he is more attached to power. If the scenario I describe here unfolds, we don't have to worry about the kinds of things we tend to worry about, like how Putin is feeling about the war, and whether Russians will be upset about losing. During an internal struggle for power in Russia, Putin and other Russians will have other things on their minds, and the war will give way to those more pressing concerns. Sometimes you change the subject, and sometimes the subject changes you.
Of course, all of this remains very hard to predict, especially at any level of detail. Other outcomes are entirely possible. But the line of development I discuss here is not only far better, but also far more likely, than the doomsday scenarios we fear. It is thus worth considering, and worth preparing for.
mutta venäjä ilmeisesti pommitti kiovan yliopiston venäjäntutkimuksen tiloja paskaksi