We must resume peace negotiations to neutralise Putin’s nuclear threat

Like rabbits mesmerised by the antics of a predatory stoat, Western nations watch Vladimir Putin perform a sequence of manoeuvres that brings him ever closer to the use of nuclear weapons, while they behave like interested, but passive, spectators. The chilling reality is that the war in Ukraine is heading into a death spin that nobody seems to have the will, the intellect or the initiative to halt.

“I don’t think Putin will use nuclear weapons” is the mantra with which people in Ukraine and the West try to reassure themselves. In the real world, what is that Pollyanna optimism worth? To help assess its validity, try transposing similar wishful thinking in the past (“I don’t think Hitler will invade Czechoslovakia…” “I don’t think Khrushchev will suppress Hungary…”) What anyone in the West thinks, individually or collectively, will have no influence on the actions of Vladimir Putin, except to encourage his aggression.

Consider recent events, to which Putin appears to have responded in a counter-intuitive fashion – anomalous behaviour that sends a sinister signal. Since the Kharkiv counter-offensive, followed now by further Ukrainian successes in Kherson, Putin has been acutely aware he is losing the war. His elite units, such as the 1^st Guards Tank Army, have been destroyed. The proportion of experienced professional soldiers among the Russian occupying forces is startlingly low.

New conscripts, without so much as a day’s training, are being rushed to the front and dispersed among existing units; but there is likely to be no one sufficiently experienced to train them, so that their presence can only dilute the already fast-ebbing morale of the Russian army. This is a Russian mobilisation uncannily resembling 1914, when large numbers of Russian conscripts were driven onto the German artillery and machine guns, armed only with sticks.

It is possible that, as recently as a few weeks ago, Putin believed that, by swamping the front with hundreds of thousands of reinforcements, he could sweep away Ukrainian resistance, employing tactics similar to China in the Korean War, when waves of human cannon fodder were sent forward to absorb all the bullets the United Nations forces were capable of firing until the survivors took the target position. It is unlikely he believes that now – with one caveat.

The weather is quickly changing in Ukraine, with weeks of rain now due, to be followed by months of freezing snow. That is why the Ukrainian forces are accelerating their advance now on three fronts: to take advantage of the window of opportunity while heavy armour can still move cross-country, retaking as much territory as possible before the relative immobility of winter warfare grinds their advance to a near standstill. Speed is also of the essence, to make gains and dig into new defensive positions before Putin’s conscripted reinforcements can arrive.

In these circumstances, projecting oneself notionally into the mind of Putin, what should he be doing, to protect his political situation? Answer: the diametric opposite of what he has actually done. And that is disquieting. Consider the evolution of Russian propaganda during the seven months of war. The invasion of Ukraine began with much fanfare, as a three-day crusade to occupy Kyiv, remove Ukraine’s “Nazi” government, install a puppet regime and reduce Ukraine to a similar relationship with Russia as that of Belarus. This was widely proclaimed as the purpose of the “special military operation”.

Then consider how things have changed, in propaganda terms. The Russian media are strident and crude in tone but they deserve credit for a certain deftness in news management. Today, hardly anyone in Russia sees the Ukraine conflict in the same terms as on 24 February. Kyiv, the target of a massive Russian armoured column in the first week of the war, is out of the picture, as is western Ukraine. Public opinion has seamlessly adjusted to a vastly diminished war aim of “defending our people in the Donbas”.

In purely propaganda terms, that was a considerable achievement by Putin, to have weathered the significant whittling-down of his war aims with little discernible domestic political damage. As Ukraine began to launch counter-offensives, Putin’s posture should have been to hold on as best his demoralised army could, until the onset of winter slowed down military operations. He could have settled for a little-advertised stalemate with reporting of the war on Russian media reduced to a minimum.

Mobilisation made that less possible, though a winter stalemate would have given time for training, supplying and reorganising his reluctant soldiers, besides entailing fewer casualties to provoke concern on the home front. Above all, Putin should have kept his war aims vague, securing as much wriggle-room as possible in future negotiations. Instead, he denied himself any wriggle-room by going through the ceremonious farce of “annexing” territories on which his army had an increasingly tenuous hold.

Why? Surely he is painting himself into a corner? Yes; and he is doing so deliberately. He is consciously creating a situation in which it would be “legal” (by an extravagant stretching of Russian doctrine on nuclear use) and politically justifiable (in Russian nationalist terms) for him to explode a nuclear device. Indeed, it seems likely he has already determined to go nuclear. If so, it also seems likely he has created a game plan that is dangerously insidious.

All the evidence – necessarily fragmentary and inconclusive – suggests that Putin’s thinking is approximately along the following lines. He overestimated his own army and its failings have both frustrated his geopolitical objectives and gravely embarrassed him, both on the world stage and before his domestic audience. Relentlessly, the Western-armed Ukrainian forces are defeating his once feared army. Daily, reports arrive on his desk of fresh setbacks, further humiliating him and potentially endangering his grasp on power.

Yet this loss of face (the worst possible fate that can befall a man of Putin’s background and mentality) is totally unnecessary: he has weapons in his armoury that could vapourise the whole of Ukraine within minutes – so, why should he put up with this situation when, at the press of a button, he could annihilate his enemies? The answer, as even Putin knows, is because retaliatory strikes would turn his nostalgic dream of a reborn Rus’ into a heap of ashes.

But – and there is some evidence Putin may be thinking along these lines – might there be a scenario in which he could use his nuclear weaponry in non-strategic mode, without incurring Dr Strangelove-style consequences? For example, if Russia detonated a low-yield, sub-kiloton nuclear weapon at a certain altitude, to avoid irradiating territory and without casualties, such an action would demonstrate Russian power and resolve.

“Russian nuclear attack – not many dead” sounds a reassuring headline and that is precisely the danger. It would break the nuclear taboo that has endured since Nagasaki in 1945 and which was – just – honoured all through the Cold War. The worst possible reaction to the detonation of a nuclear weapon is “Well, that wasn’t so bad…” Anything that erodes the global consensus on the unthinkability of using nuclear armaments is a threat to civilisation.

The human reality, too, is that once one has pressed the nuclear button, it becomes easier to press it again. If tactical nuclear weapons become acceptable on the battlefield, or even as a demonstration for blackmail purposes, we are on the slippery slope to destruction. The biggest danger of nuclear arsenals is accidental launch due to a misunderstanding. Nuclear weapons have long been regarded as so escalatory that there has been an innate scepticism about reports of enemy launches that, on several occasions, has saved us from a cataclysm. With mushroom clouds dotting the landscape during tactical exchanges, that would no longer obtain.

World leaders have a duty to respond constructively to the present threat and to try to generate some kind of exploratory negotiations before the Russian dictator gets creative with his chemistry set. Any attempt to canvass a negotiated end to the war, as Elon Musk has discovered, will provoke a torrent of abuse from the Blimps on Twitter: their noise should be ignored, we are addressing something more important than gender pronouns – the averting of possible nuclear war.

For the avoidance of doubt: Ukraine is morally in the right. It is the victim of aggression by a state that denies its right to exist as a nation. Russian occupying forces have committed murder, rape and looting on an unconscionable scale. The West is right to arm and finance its struggle to expel the invader and must continue to do so. But Ukraine is suffering heavy casualties and would benefit from a secure peace.

Now that Putin’s fantasy of conquering the whole of Ukraine and installing a puppet government in Kyiv has effectively evaporated, the issue resolves itself to the four “annexed” territories, plus Crimea. Elon Musk’s suggestion is to hold a genuine referendum in those regions, with both sides pledged to honour the result. Before the detachment of Crimea in 2014, following the extremely murky “Revolution of Dignity” on the “Euromaidan”, the Russian proportion of the Ukrainian electorate was large enough to have voted a pro-Russian government into power.

Its violent overthrow, with elections due within a year, was hardly a democratic exercise. Russia’s retaliatory annexation of Crimea changed the national electoral demographic in favour of ethnic Ukrainian voters. But what about locally, in the Donbas? Anecdotally, it seems many who formerly identified as Russians have been disillusioned by the experience of occupation and would now prefer to be governed by Volodymyr Zelensky. There is a democratic mechanism for resolving the issue, under UN supervision, and it should be tried.

The overriding imperative in such an exercise would be to repatriate the 1.6 million Ukrainians allegedly deported to Russia, incidentally gerrymandering any referendum. Ukrainians have responded bitterly to Elon Musk’s suggestion by pointing out that the dead of Mariupol cannot vote. Their bitterness is fully justified, but nuclear war will not help anyone. If a referendum could be held, adjustments to the frontier would be a necessary outcome.

Ukraine should be prepared to live with that, in return for peace. As for the Crimea, it is difficult to discern any justification for detaching it from Russia. It was Russian from 1783 until 1954, when Nikita Khruschev arbitrarily attached it to Ukraine, to increase the ethnic Russian population. Since 67.9 per cent of the Crimean population is Russian and 15.7 per cent Ukrainian, no referendum could credibly assign it to Kyiv.

The non-irradiated future for Ukraine and the world lies with the principle of self-determination: people should live as part of the nation with which they identify, so far as is practicable, That would entail Ukraine losing a relatively small part of its territory in return for demographic homogeneity and a lasting peace. Would Ukraine really want to govern border regions populated by dissidents pursuing subversive warfare against the state?

With concessions such as Ukraine guaranteeing the water supply to Crimea and the cession of limited territories on the eastern frontier, while preserving wide Ukrainian access to the Black Sea, the deal could be adequately dressed up to save Putin’s face, with the help of a complicit Russian media. Reports of a train carrying nuclear weapons headed towards the war zone may be accurate, or merely theatre; but there is a real threat of Putin using a nuclear weapon and that menace must be neutralised.

Ukraine, understandably, will resist peace talks, as its forces are advancing; but negotiations are best conducted from a position of strength. Concessions awarding Russia only the limited territories that would vote to be ruled by Moscow would not be rewarding Putin for his aggression – which aspired to eliminate the entire state of Ukraine – but, rather, respecting the principle of self-determination. Otherwise, Kyiv and the West would forfeit the moral high ground by compelling people in, for example, Crimea to live as citizens of an alien country, thereby assuming the mantle of Vladimir Putin.

Winston Churchill famously said that jaw-jaw was preferable to war-war. We need to start exploratory moves towards peace negotiations now.

Write to us with your comments to be considered for publication at letters@reaction.life