Containing the West, Nukes, the First Rule of Proxy Fight Club, and the Putin Message Everyone Fails to Get

On 25 September 2024, Russia’s president Vladimir Putin chaired a meeting of his country’s (in official terminology) Security Council standing conference on nuclear deterrence. The Security Council meets in this format twice a year, as Putin emphasized in his introductory remarks, as if to imply that this was not an extraordinary but a regular event. Yet, surely, he did so tongue-in-cheek, because the content of his published remarks (in Russian here, in the official English translation here) was anything but routine.

The president took the opportunity to announce a significant revision of Russia’s official doctrine on nuclear deterrence and, “first of all,” the conditions of the actual use of nuclear weapons in war. That revision is needed, his listeners learned, because the contemporary “military-political situation is rapidly changing,” producing “new sources of military threats and risks for Russia and our allies,” while “at the same time, our nuclear triad remains the most important security guarantee for our state and citizens, an instrument for maintaining strategic parity and balance of forces in the world.”

His statement, less than five minutes long, has since created a stir. While it was as concise and clear as you could imagine, especially given the extremely complex subject matter, international reactions – especially in the West – have displayed a degree of confusion. As so often, Western politicians and experts find it intriguingly difficult to simply listen to what the Russians have to say. There it is again, that Western attention deficit disorder that misunderstands itself as the Russians being obscure.