Playing the Nuclear Card Is Putin’s Version of Flop Sweat

The following is excerpted from a new afterword to the paperback edition ofa pioneering diplomat who spent her career advancing democracy in the post-Soviet world. Yovanovitch penned this afterword on Russia’s war in Ukraine in the fall of 2022 and continues to speak publicly about the latest developments.As Russia’s war on the Ukrainian people continues, so do its efforts to deter the West from providing support to Ukraine.

It is naive to believe that if we give in to nuclear blackmail, Putin will back off. If Russia gets its way with Ukraine following such threats, Russia will not stop. Russia will keep on going and will deploy nuclear threats in the hope of securing further concessions. Other nuclear countries will take note, and non-nuclear countries will rush to get a nuclear weapon so that their sovereignty won’t be threatened.

But the war will end, as all wars do. While it’s not clear what conditions Moscow would accept, Russia is not in a position to dictate terms, and most military experts believe it can’t improve its position on the ground. That’s why it is dangling the nuclear and energy threat over the West, hoping that the West will push Ukraine into concessions.For its part, Ukraine—and Ukrainians—are rightly wary of being forced to make unsustainable compromises.

The West will play an important role in the endgame, but we need to be careful that as we seek to “help,” we don’t offer compromises and supposed “off-ramps” that Russia pockets without living up to its own obligations as has so often been the case in the past. We need to ensure that when we seek to be constructive, Putin sees a strong power to be reckoned with, not a weak country to be taken advantage of.

Putin’s actions over the past decade have made clear that we ignore Russia at our peril, and that Russia will become even more dangerous as the country continues to spiral downward. There are many who believe that China poses the larger long-term risk to our security, and that may well be true. But the best way to deal with China is through Ukraine. If Ukraine emerges victorious, China will take note.

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