Moscow’s mind games: Ambiguity around Russia’s nukes aims to rattle Europe

Vladimir Putin’s rhetoric and missile strikes are part of a broader strategy of cognitive warfare, blending military power with psychological intimidation. His manipulative messaging aims to rattle NATO’s resolve and create uncertainty in Europe’s response

Just days before Donald Trump’s inauguration, the Biden administration accused Russia of violating the US-Russian New START Treaty by potentially exceeding its deployed nuclear warhead limit “by a small number”. Russia illegally suspended the treaty in February 2023 and has since refused to share treaty-mandated data on deployed warheads and their locations to create uncertainty around its compliance.

Cognitive warfare

Russia’s President Vladimir Putin favours nuclear threats as a tool of cognitive warfare to rattle Ukraine’s Western backers. At the start of his full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, he ordered Russia’s nuclear forces to be on heightened alert status. He followed that with nuclear exercises, a dirty bomb scare, deployments of nuclear weapons to Belarus, arms control suspensions, and plenty of bluster.

Western governments have moderated their military aid to Ukraine to avoid crossing Russian “red lines”. No NATO troops are fighting alongside Ukraine’s. Still, Russian commentators have lamented that the Kremlin has not extracted more coercive value from the world’s largest and most diversified nuclear arsenal. Thus, in November 2024, the Kremlin fine-tuned the language of its nuclear doctrine to give itself more leverage through calculated ambiguity.

Uncertainty can be uncomfortable at best and paralysing at worst. To maintain the upper hand, Russia’s military leadership seeks to keep Europeans’ anxious about its nuclear potential.

Ever more missiles

Missile strikes have been a key feature of Russia’s offensive in Ukraine since the beginning. Many of the systems it fires at the country are capable of also delivering nuclear warheads. Russia first used a nuclear-capable Kinzhal air-launched ballistic missile in March 2022 to target a former Soviet nuclear weapons storage site that Ukraine used to keep conventional munitions. One Russian analyst confidently claimed at the time that the attack had sent a “clear signal” of intimidation to Ukraine’s Western backers. (Ukraine has since downed Kinzhals on several occasions with Western-supplied anti-missile systems.)

A clearer signal came on November 21st 2024, when Russia fired an experimental intermediate-range ballistic missile (IRBM) at Ukraine. The Oreshnik IRBM struck an industrial site on the outskirts of the city of Dnipro in the eastern part of the country. Many of Russia’s weapons have the capability to strike a target less than 300km away from its border. Choosing Oreshnik, which has a range estimated at several thousands of kilometres, was intended to send a message to Europeans: we can hit you, anywhere.

The 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty between the Soviet Union and the United States prohibited the development and deployment of ground-launched weapons ranging between 500km-5,500km, like the Oreshnik IRBM, until its demise in 2019. Moscow thus obscured its efforts by artificially testing its missile design at ranges beyond the treaty’s limit during the 2010s.

In statements following the November 2024 strike on Dnipro, Putin boasted about the missile’s non-nuclear utility and hypersonic speed. He also mentioned potential deployments of Oreshnik missiles to Belarus, likely to appear to mirror a US-German decision to station American conventional-armed long-range missiles in Germany from 2026. Although Oreshnik carried non-nuclear projectiles last November, the missile is primarily designed to deliver nuclear payloads to any corner of Europe. This warhead ambiguity and uncertainty around basing will give Putin plenty of opportunities to make headlines with his missiles.

“Sput-nuke”

Three weeks before its missiles began to rain down on Ukraine in early February 2022, Russia launched a satellite into orbit, nominally to test the “influence of radiation and heavy charged particles” on onboard sensors and systems. In February 2024, US officials warned that Kosmos 2553 could be the precursor of a novel nuclear anti-satellite weapon. A nuclear detonation in space would indiscriminately destroy hundreds of satellites and fry thousands more as they orbit through the radiation cloud over days, weeks and months, leading to ever more collisions and debris.

With such a weapon, Russia could negate early in a conflict NATO’s advantage in space-based systems, including the intelligence, communications and precision-strike capabilities that depend on them. It could also be a weapon of last resort to terminate a war that was not going in Russia’s favour. Or it could be an instrument of catalytic escalation to force an increasingly space-dependent China to intervene on Russia’s behalf in a conflict with NATO, lest it risk losing its satellites.

Most likely, Russia’s leaders don’t know themselves yet how they could use a nuclear capability in space, but hints and allusions that they could are sure to keep observers on their toes. As if to prove this point, Russia vetoed a UN Security Council resolution in April 2024 reaffirming the 1967 Outer Space Treaty’s provision not to place nuclear weapons in orbit. The other 13 countries voted in favour and China uncharacteristically abstained, rather than side with Russia.

A mushroom cloud

This year marks the 80th anniversary of the first and, so far, only use of nuclear weapons in war (they have been used plenty for tests and signalling). In his September 2022 speech announcing the illegal annexation of four Ukrainian regions, Putin asserted that the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the US in 1945 had “created a precedent” for nuclear use. He appears to think that the decision to detonate the bombs was primarily intended to intimidate the Soviet leadership, rather than compel Japan to surrender. The Russian leader is notorious for misreading and instrumentalising history.  

If Putin came to believe that his campaign to subjugate Ukraine was winding down in his favour, fed by a perception of Trump disengaging and Europeans in disarray, he might be tempted to take a page from his reading of the United States’ second world war playbook and detonate a nuclear warhead. Live images of a mushroom cloud have not been seen in generations. Even if exploded in a remote area without immediate casualties, the image alone would be enough to rattle Europeans and provide an opening for Putin to redefine the end of the cold war on his terms.

Countering the mind games

There is no magical switch to turn off Russia’s cognitive warfare. Robust military capabilities are necessary to deter the use of Oreshnik and other weapons against NATO countries and defeat Russian aggression, if necessary. International diplomacy can raise the political cost of deploying a nuclear-armed satellite or conducting a nuclear test for Russia.

The Kremlin has long understood that NATO’s unity rests on the resolve of its leaders and publics. Russian attempts to target their minds are thus sure to continue. Having a better sense of the Kremin’s tactics will enhance European resilience to Russian cognitive warfare.