War in Ukraine: Putin keeps one finger on the nuclear trigger

Vladimir Putin's traditional annual speech at the Valdai forum had been carefully prepared. After the speech by the head of the Kremlin before this circle of experts closely linked to the Russian presidential administration, gathered in Sochi, on the Black Sea, one of the only participants authorized to ask a question was Sergei Karaganov, Moscow's chief executive officer. international relations, positioned since the invasion of Ukraine at the head of the “nuclear hawks”. “Should Russia lower the threshold for its use of nuclear weapons?” Karaganov asked the Russian president. An interpellation by which the expert took up one of his favorite things and which at the same time offered Mr. Putin the opportunity to develop, in his purest style, a speech mixing martial chin thrusts and barely veiled threats to against the West. The main target, once again, of the Russian president.

“Do we need to change (doctrine)? Everything can be changed but I don’t see the need,” Vladimir Putin responded to Sergei Karaganov’s telephone question. “I don't see anyone with a little sense and a clear memory who would think of using nuclear weapons against Russia,” continued Mr. Putin in front of the approximately one hundred and forty guests, including many personalities from BRICS, gathered at Sochi. “Any nuclear attack against Russia would trigger in the second a response of hundreds of nuclear missiles – hundreds, he repeated –, which no enemy could survive.” Statements supported by the announcement, a little earlier by the head of the Kremlin, that Russia had tested – without specifying the date – its subsonic nuclear cruise missile, the Bourevestnik (petrel, in French), which the Russians describe as “unparalleled” and with “unlimited” reach.

It was also the pretext, for Vladimir Putin, to move his iron into related territory, that of nuclear tests, and to deliver an announcement on this subject in the flow of a speech which, moreover, recycled many of his anti- -usual Western ones. The Russian president thus brandished a possible exit from the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) of 1996, signed and ratified by Russia, unlike the United States and China who have not ratified it. “I am not ready to tell you whether we actually need to conduct tests or not, but it is theoretically possible to behave as the United States does,” Mr. Putin said. Moscow carried out its last test in 1990; Washington in 1992. After the suspension of its participation in the New Start disarmament treaty last February, a resumption of nuclear tests would have profoundly destabilizing effects, experts believe. Many in the West nevertheless doubt Russia's use of nuclear weapons, both because of its apocalyptic effects and because China, a leading partner for Moscow, would not allow it.

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Mr. Putin's statements nevertheless come in a context where the specter of an escalation has resurfaced, in the media at least, with the statements - quite abstruse - last week of the boss of Russia Today, Margarita Simonian . She pleaded for the explosion of an atomic bomb above Siberia, with the particular aim, according to her, of showing the West that "Russia's patience is running out." presidential elections next March, for which Mr. Putin could soon reveal, without real suspense, his intentions (in November, the daily Kommersant recently indicated), the nuclear threat remains above all for the master of the Kremlin a double-trigger communication weapon, both to stigmatize the United States and to promote oneself in relation to its internal opinion.