Putin’s Armageddon plan keeps working

Russian state-controlled media has long and repeatedly embraced the grim notion of releasing a nuclear doomsday upon the world. There are times, it seems, when Moscow’s motto for the war in Ukraine is “Armageddon or bust.” 

It is no longer a policy of escalating to de-escalate. Rather, as the West becomes inured to Russia’s failures on the conventional battlefield, a nuclear war keeps coming up as Russia’s veiled threat each time a new battlefield capability is provided to Ukraine. The threat is so persistent as to merit a new title for the old fable: “The Bear who Cried Wolf.”

Indeed, former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev did it again last Sunday, declaring that the Kremlin would unleash a “global nuclear fire” if Ukraine were to prevail in its ongoing NATO-backed counteroffensive. 

So far, cooler heads than Medvedev’s have prevailed in the Kremlin. Aside from the usual Russian propaganda involving nuking Berlin, London or Washington, we have yet to witness any overt evidence of Russian President Vladimir Putin going down the end-of-times path.  

Would Putin do it? For context, he does have a track record of foreshadowing his future moves by packaging them in myths, historical justifications and religious symbolism. In risk-assessing the likelihood of Armageddon, we should not readily dismiss this course of action.

In 2016, he unveiled a statue of St. Vladimir the Great, the 10th century Varangian grand prince who had founded the Kievan Rus proto-state. The Kremlin appropriated Kievan Rus’s history, which predates the first mention of Moscow as a small village by 265 years, and tried to use this myth to justify its claim upon Ukraine.

Putin also makes use of his country’s recent Communist history, relying, heavily on Joseph Stalin’s vision of a Red Arctic in his decision to invest in the Northern Sea Route. In essence, Putin often justifies his decisions as continuums of Russian history, as though they were bigger than himself.

Putin also seeks to wrap his decisions in the sanctity of the Russian Orthodox Church. His partnership with Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and All Russia, the head of the church, has enabled Putin to portray his war against Ukraine and the West as a religious crusade. Although it is not used in weekly liturgy, Revelations 16 and its reference to Armageddon is included in the church’s official Elizabeth Bible.

That is the packaging. But does any of it really drive or define Putin’s policies? Probably not.

Each example was likely conceived as grandiose cover for baser motives behind Putin’s ambitions. The embrace of Kievan Rus mythology was simply a means of finding an imperial path to match the territorial ambitions of Peter the Great. The Red Arctic was simply an excuse to exploit Russia’s vast natural resources and divvy them up amongst his oligarchs. Likewise, Kirill is simply used as a tool to moralize the immoral, including war crimes in Ukraine and elsewhere.

So, what is the purpose behind Putin’s tacit approval of Russian state-controlled media raising the specter of nuclear war?

In late May of this year, as one example, Vladimir Solovyov, Putin’s best-known propagandist, invoked Armageddon yet again on his Russia One nightly evening television show. According to Julia Davis,  a Russian media expert and columnist for The Daily Beast, one of his guests characterized winning or losing the war in Ukraine in stark apocalyptic terms and as “a question of our destruction.”

The why is simple enough. Putin has two audiences. First, his propaganda machine needs to reassure Russians, increasingly bewildered by Moscow’s military setbacks in Ukraine. For them, nuclear weapons are like a teddy bear, a comforting reminder that they cannot ever lose.

Conversely Putin needs to convince the world that Mother Russia just might be crazy enough to trigger Armageddon. Hence the nearly endless parade of Mad Hatters on Russian state-controlled television and radio singing the virtues of Armageddon as a last resort, just as Medvedev did on Sunday. The fearmongering also has a grassroots component, in the form of Russian disinformation on social media.

What goes unsaid is that, if Russia wants to win, Putin cannot use his nuclear arsenal. That would be game over not only for the West, but for him as well.

With that in mind, Medvedev’s comment is only unique because he may be the first Russian official to publicly acknowledge that Kyiv’s counteroffensive is succeeding, and that “Russian territory” will be lost.

Is Russia’s Armageddon gambit working? Arguably, yes it is. Putin has yet to toppled. The Biden Administration, since day one, has been gripped with escalation paralysis, not only due to Putin’s threats of nuclear Armageddon, but also for fear of who might succeed him were Ukraine to win outright.

In that regard, paradoxically, Putin’s inculcation of the West with a fear of a nuclear doomsday has partially insulated him from losing.  

Some will argue that with nukes, Russia could end the war in an hour without regard to a U.S. or NATO response — the mutually assured destruction course of action. But ending the war in that manner means ending Russia as well, and Putin understands that.

Putin is indeed planning Armageddon, but not as we envisioned it. It is probably not a nuclear Armageddon, but an ideological one. His designs and hopes for victory in Ukraine are predicated upon the West caving to his doomsday threats, in the process destroying our own liberty just so we can survive in a totalitarian-controlled world. 

If that happens, it be our own self-inflicted Armageddon.

Mark Toth is an economist, entrepreneur, and former board member of the World Trade Center, St. Louis. Jonathan Sweet, a retired Army colonel and 30-year military intelligence officer, led the U.S. European Command Intelligence Engagement Division from 2012 to 2014.