'Nuclear blackmail': Deconstructing Putin's latest strategic gamble in Ukraine

It's been called the nuclear blackmail card — both within western diplomatic and defence circles and in Russia itself.

And it's a reference to President Vladimir Putin's poker-faced threat on Wednesday to resort to weapons of mass destruction if NATO steps over the line or Ukraine reclaims more of its own occupied territory.

Insisting that "this is not a bluff," Putin warned that he has many such weapons at his disposal.

What might not be apparent from all the screaming headlines that followed — and from Putin's order to partially mobilize his country's military — is that his bluff is already being called in some respects. Ukraine believes he's playing with a hand that has grown increasingly weak.

The thinking in the Kremlin, according to a number of experts, is that Moscow's call for four referendums in the Ukrainian provinces its troops now occupy but do not fully control — Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson — would formally draw them under Mother Russia's nuclear security dome.

The Russian military's nuclear doctrine says the Kremlin is justified in using all means at its disposal if the army faces a conventional defeat on its own soil.

In the eyes of military experts who've been following the campaign, what's been happening on Ukrainian soil in the east is more like a rout than a defeat — with Russian troops abandoning tanks and troop carriers and hitching rides to the border. 

Christian Leuprecht, a professor at the Royal Military College of Canada, said the Kremlin seems to fear that if it doesn't "hold those farcical referenda in the next 10 days or so, there won't be a referendum for them to hold."

The nuclear threat may be Putin's way of pressuring the West to lean on the Ukrainians to open negotiations, he said. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said this week he believes the Russian leader wants to end the war he began in Ukraine "as soon as possible."

"Why would the Ukrainians negotiate with the Russians at this point?" Leuprecht asked.

Dominique Arel, chair of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Ottawa, said Putin has been waving the nuclear blackmail card from the beginning and it hasn't deterred NATO from arming Ukraine. Nor has it stopped the Ukrainian counteroffensive, including attacks in Crimea, which was formally annexed by Russia.

"[Crimea has] been occupied since 2014," said Arel in a recent interview. "You could say, 'Well, Crimea is actually Russia, [but] they haven't responded with nuclear weapons.'"

Russian military installations in the occupied peninsula were attacked twice over the summer. Ukraine will neither confirm nor deny that it was behind the bombings.

"I don't think it's a factor for Ukrainians, one bit, this nuclear blackmail," Arel said. "And my reading is, it's not affecting the military calculus of Western allies ...