Steve Gutterman's Week In Russia

I'm Steve Gutterman, the editor of RFE/RL's Russia/Ukraine/Belarus Desk.

Welcome to The Week In Russia, in which I dissect the key developments in Russian politics and society over the previous week and look at what's ahead. To receive The Week In Russia newsletter in your inbox, click here.

President Vladimir Putin threatens to station tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus. An American journalist is arrested on spy charges, a post-Soviet first. A father is separated from his daughter and sentenced to prison after the child is reported for drawings lamenting Russia's war against Ukraine.

Here are some of the key developments in Russia over the past week and some of the takeaways going forward.

Scare Tactics

Since he unleashed the large-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Putin and other officials have issued frequent reminders of a fact that cannot fail to affect decisions and actions by Kyiv, Moscow, the West, and more: Russia has nuclear weapons.

While mostly maintaining a level of deniability, Russian authorities have repeatedly raised the specter of the potential use of nuclear weapons -- whether it's a slavering state-TV pundit, former President Dmitry Medvedev fantasizing aloud about bombing the Bundestag in Berlin, or Putin announcing he has ordered new nuclear missiles to be put on combat duty.

Such signaling and saber-rattling is not new. It dates back long before the 2022 invasion, because Russia's nuclear arsenal has always been its best argument for being treated like a superpower, or something close to it, since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

But the frequency of these remarks seems to have increased over the 13 months since Russian forces invaded Ukraine from the north and east and Russian rockets hit targets across the country on February 24, 2022.

The latest instance, at least for now, came last weekend, when state television released remarks in which Putin said Russia could deploy tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus -- which borders Ukraine and three NATO nations -- by July.

Militarily, analysts said, there would be little point or none at all in Moscow moving some of its estimated 2,000 or so tactical nuclear weapons to Belarus.

"There is no military expediency in this action," Pavel Podvig, an expert on Russia's nuclear arsenal and a senior researcher with the UN Institute for Disarmament Research in Geneva, told RFE/RL's Belarus Service.

So why would Putin say he could do it?

Here are a few potential reasons.

Two Words: Nuclear Weapons

Quite simply, Putin may be eager to keep the words ‘nuclear weapons' on people's lips as much as possible, given that Russia's atomic arsenal is its ace-in-the-hole -- particularly in light of the performance of its conventional forces, which are suffering severe losses and making little progress in Ukraine, a situation underscored by the monthlong battle for the Donbas city of Bakhmut.

"I think the starting point for this is that Russia is on its back foot in the war in Ukraine" so Putin feels Moscow "needs to look like it's being tough," Daniel Speckhard, a former senior NATO official and U.S. ambassador to Belarus, told RFE/RL on March 29. "And I think this was the next way to raise the stakes."

With Ukraine expected to launch a counteroffensive in the coming weeks in a bid to take back more of the territory that Russia has occupied in the east and south, Putin may consider it useful to play the nuclear card – or, more accurately, not play it but flash it in from of his opponents' eyes.

Threat Level Unchanged

At the same time, Putin's statement, and even the dispatch of tactical nuclear weapons to Belarus, if that does occur, enables the Kremlin to keep the implicit warning prominent without necessarily increasing the level of the threat to Ukraine, NATO, and the West.

As The New York Times put it, analysts "pointed out that even if Russia were to transfer some of its warheads, the action wouldn't substantially change the nuclear threat posed by Russia since it can already target a vast range of territory from inside its own borders." Ukraine directly borders Russia in addition to Belarus, and Russia shares borders with NATO nations Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland.

U.S. and NATO officials suggested there was no sign of an increased threat of the use of nuclear weapons. NATO spokeswoman Oana Lungescu called Putin's words "dangerous and irresponsible" but said the alliance has "not seen any changes in Russia's nuclear posture that would lead us to adjust our own."

"We've in fact seen no indication he has any intention to use nuclear weapons, period, inside Ukraine," said U.S. National Security Council spokesman John Kirby.

Putin's announcement was "first and foremost for their domestic audience, this looking tough part," Speckhard said.

"But it's also a reminder to the West to not get complacent," he added. "You know, they are on their back foot, their conventional forces have been seriously deteriorated and weakened as a result of this war…and so reminding everybody, ‘Hey, we're a nuclear power,' is a way to try to rebalance what feels like an out-of-balance security situation in Europe right now for Russia."

Pressure To Pressure Ukraine

Many analysts say that amid setbacks on the battlefield in Ukraine, Putin is pinning his hopes on U.S. and European support flagging as time passes and on Western calls for Kyiv to make concessions to Moscow -- rather than pursuing its stated goal of taking back all the territory Russia has occupied since 2014, including Crimea -- gaining traction.

"This is an attempt to destabilize the situation, to frighten those people in the West who have a tendency to be frightened," Arkady Moshes, an expert on the foreign policies of Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia at the Finnish Institute of International Affairs, told the Belarus Service.

"This decision looks like a continuation of Putin's blackmail, trying to force Western and NATO countries to make compromises on Ukraine," said Belarusian political analyst Artsyom Shraybman, speaking to RFE/RL's Russian Service.

"They are trying to demonstrate that Russia can still raise the stakes in ways that would be dangerous for the West. It is an ultimatum to the West, and Belarus is barely even a player."

Rope Belarus To Russia

"Barely even a player" is an assessment that points to another potential motive for Putin, placing the possible positioning of tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus in the context of Moscow's continuing efforts to increase its control over the far smaller neighboring country that is the closest thing it has to an ally.

On paper, Russia and Belarus have been joined together in a "Union State" since the 1990s, but that has little substance, and the authoritarian longtime leader of Belarus, Alyaksandr Lukashenka, has resisted steps toward the kind of integration that could make him little more than a provincial governor.

However, Lukashenka's brutal clampdown on dissent following a deeply disputed 2020 election, as well as his support for Russia's war against Ukraine, have alienated millions of Belarusians and further isolated him from the West, pushing Minsk more tightly into Moscow's embrace.

"In my opinion, the whole idea is primarily political -- to demonstrate the strengthening political union between Belarus and Russia," Podvig told RFE/RL's Belarus Service.

Pavel Luzin, a defense and foreign policy expert who is a visiting scholar at the Fletcher School at Tufts University in the United States, suggested that if Lukashenka believes he would benefit from the placement of Russian nuclear weapons in Belarus, he is mistaken.

"Lukashenka wants Russian nuclear weapons in Belarus...because he thinks that if Russia deploys them, Moscow will depend on him just has he now depends on Moscow," Luzin told the Belarus Service. "He does not understand that if a nuclear weapons storage facility is opened in Belarus, troops will also be located there…. The consequence of a nuclear-weapons storage facility could be the creation of several permanent Russian military bases."

Anything that could bring Belarus closer to direct involvement in a war is unlikely to be popular in Belarus, which suffered massive death and destruction in World War II. Since he came to power in 1994 -- the year Russia began the first of two deadly military campaigns in Chechnya -- a key to Lukashenka's popularity has been the fact that the country has not been at war.

"In the summer of 2022, according to polls, 80 percent of Belarusians opposed the basing of Russian nuclear weapons in Belarus. So in terms of domestic politics, this is a problem for Lukashenka," Shraybman said. "Up until now, he has been able to position himself for many Belarusians as the guarantor of peace and security. Now that will be harder."

The deployment of Russian tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus would "certainly have an impact on the further subjugation of the country," Speckhard said.

Exiled opposition leader Svyatlana Tsikhanouskaya said the plan violates the constitution "and grossly contradicts the will of the Belarusian people to assume the non-nuclear state status expressed in the Declaration of State Sovereignty of Belarus of 1990."

Like Ukraine and Kazakhstan, Belarus gave up the nuclear weapons stationed on its territory after it gained independence in the Soviet collapse.

They did so under the Budapest Memorandum, a 1994 deal in which Russia, the United States, and Britain agreed to respect the signatories' independence and sovereignty within their existing borders and refrain from the threat or use of force against them -- pledges torn apart by Moscow with its war against Ukraine.

House Of Horrors

The scale of the horror of the Russian state's war on Ukraine has, naturally, overshadowed its continuing clampdown on political opposition, independent media, civil society, and all forms of dissent at home, which has grown even more intense since the February 2022 invasion.

At least two developments this week underscored that intensity.

On March 30, the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) arrested Evan Gershkovich, an American reporter for The Wall Street Journal, and accused him of spying. Putin's spokesman claimed without evidence that he was caught "red-handed," but the newspaper said it "vehemently denies the allegations from the FSB and seeks the immediate release of our trusted and dedicated reporter."

Gershkovich, 31, is the only U.S. journalist to be arrested on espionage accusations in Russia since the breakup of the U.S.S.R. In 1986, reporter Nicholas Daniloff was detained in Moscow; he was released 20 days later in a swap for an employee of the Soviet UN mission who had been arrested by the FBI on spying charges.

On March 28, a man whose daughter drew an anti-war picture at school was sentenced to two years in prison under a law signed by Putin days after the invasion that criminalizes words and images deemed by the state to discredit the Russian military amid operations abroad.

Aleksei Moskalyov was sentenced in absentia because he had escaped house arrest shortly before the verdict was handed down, but he was arrested in Minsk less than 48 hours later. His daughter Maria, 13, was taken from their home in the city of Tula in December and placed in a state institution.

The father and daughter's troubles started after Maria drew a picture at school last year depicting a woman standing next to a Ukrainian flag and protecting a child from missiles coming from Russia.

The principal reported her to the police, who later found Internet posts in which Moskalyov condemned the war in Ukraine and displayed a caricature of Putin.

OVD-Info, an NGO that monitors arrests and other form of oppression in Russia, posted what it said was a letter Maria wrote to her father expressing love, support, pride, and concern.

"When you feel bad or you worry, I get sick and feel very bad. I believe that everything will be fine and we will be together," she wrote. "I hope for the best and love you very much."

That's it from me this week.

If you want to know more, catch up on my podcast The Week Ahead In Russia, out every Monday, here on our site or wherever you get your podcasts (Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Pocket Casts).

The next edition of The Week In Russia will appear on April 14.

Yours,

Steve Gutterman

I'm Steve Gutterman, the editor of RFE/RL's Russia/Ukraine/Belarus Desk.

Welcome to The Week In Russia, in which I dissect the key developments in Russian politics and society over the previous week and look at what's ahead. To receive The Week In Russia newsletter in your inbox, click here.

President Vladimir Putin is now a wanted man, the subject of an arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court on suspicion of war crimes over the illegal transfer of Ukrainian children to Russia. How will it affect Putin's fate and the course of Russia's war against Ukraine?

Here are some of the key developments in Russia over the past week and some of the takeaways going forward.

Myths And Motives

The overarching narrative that Putin seems to have settled on as justification for the unprovoked invasion of Ukraine is that Washington and the West have weaponized Ukraine, assiduously turning it into an "anti-Russia" in a long-standing effort to destroy his country.

Repeated countless times without credible evidence, this story deprives Ukraine of agency, portraying the country as a tool in Western hands -- a soldier drafted into the service of U.S. geopolitical goals. At its heart is the false claim that the Euromaidan movement -- massive protests that erupted in 2013 after President Viktor Yanukovych succumbed to pressure and incentives from Putin and scrapped plans for closer ties with the European Union, and that ended when he fled to Russia in February 2014 -- was a Western-backed coup.

Never mind the fact that President Volodymyr Zelenskiy was elected five years after what Ukrainians call the Revolution of Dignity, and that he beat out the politician who replaced Yanukovych -- in part by campaigning on a platform of peace with Russia.

While he points the finger at the West, going back two decades or more there is plenty of evidence of Putin seeking to shape Ukrainian politics and election results to fit what some call his obsession with making the country a part of Russia or at the very least a loyal sidekick, subordinate to Moscow and lacking sovereignty.

In November 2004, six months into his second term, Putin congratulated Yanukovych after a presidential runoff vote marred by evidence of fraud in his favor, including voter intimidation, physical violence, and the burning of ballot boxes.

Putin's endorsement came shortly before he met with EU leaders at a summit in The Hague, and it added to tensions brewing after he basically blamed the West for the Beslan school massacre that September and took steps that rolled back post-Soviet advances in democracy and human rights in Russia.

With hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians demonstrating in peaceful street protests now known as the Orange Revolution, Putin's backing was not enough for Yanukovych, who lost to rival Viktor Yushchenko in a new vote held in January 2005.

Five years later, though, Yanukovych ran again and won, setting the stage for the momentous events of 2014, when his departure was followed by Russia's takeover of Crimea and the start of the war in Ukraine's eastern Donbas region, where Moscow fired up anti-Kyiv sentiments and backed separatist forces.

And nearly eight years after that, in February 2022, Putin launched a dramatic and deadly escalation of the war by ordering the large-scale invasion of Ukraine. Thirteen months later, tens of thousands of Ukrainians have been killed and millions driven from their homes, and the war continues with no end in sight.

Now, Putin is wanted in The Hague once again: The International Criminal Court (ICC), which is based there, issued an arrest warrant for Putin on March 17, alleging that he was responsible for war crimes: the unlawful deportation and transfer of children from occupied areas of Ukraine to Russia.

There is debate about the significance of the warrant.

"On a pragmatic level -- first of all, this is not going to have any particular impact on Putin at home," Mark Galeotti, an author and analyst of Russian politics and an honorary professor at the School of Slavonic & East European Studies at University College London, said on his podcast on March 19. "We should recognize the degree to which it would be naïve to say this should somehow trigger some kind of political change in Russia -- it's not going to."

Despite the fact that the ICC is not a Western institution, he said that domestically, word of the warrant "is being used as a way of trying to shore up a narrative about the degree to which there are no depths to which the West will not stoop...in order to try and undermine Russia."

"Because after all," he said, Putin and his government are telling the Russian people that rather than a war of aggression against Ukraine, "this is a war for Russian sovereignty, this is a war for Russian autonomy, this is a war for Russia not to bend the knee to the evil American hegemon."

A Turning Point?

In part because Putin seems highly unlikely to travel to any country that might arrest him, meanwhile, and because countries including Russia, China, and the United States are not members of the ICC, some see the court's move as purely symbolic.

Others disagree. Russia analyst Sam Greene suggested that the day the ICC issued the arrest warrant would come to be seen as one of the "turning points" in the development of post-Soviet Russia -- days "when something happens that genuinely alters the calculations and trajectories of human action" or "moments of crystallization, when we recognize the truth of a reality that has been building up around us."

He listed it along with the killing of journalist Anna Politkovskaya in 2006, the invasion of Georgia in 2008, the seizure of Crimea in 2014, and the large-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, "when Russia became what it had long been becoming: the most pressing threat to global peace and security."

It would be a mistake to dismiss the ICC decision to indict Putin as a morally significant but politically inconsequential gesture, Greene, a professor at King's College London's Russia Institute and director of Democratic Resilience at the Center for European Policy Analysis, wrote in his blog on Substack.

"On the face of it, the news from The Hague did not give us any new information, and yet the indictment of Putin changes just about everything," he wrote. "For as long as Putin is in power, and perhaps longer, normalization of relations with Europe, with the West in general, and indeed with any of the 123 state parties to the Rome Statute is impossible."

"For anyone who was hedging their bets today to see how things might go tomorrow, whether that be Russian elites hoping for a partial postwar reset, or Western leaders fretting about the same, the uncertainty that underpinned those thought processes has just evaporated," Greene wrote. "In its place...emerges a simple truth: with Putin, there is no future."

There's arguably a potential downside to that truth: If Putin recognizes it as the truth, it might make him even less likely to end the war in Ukraine and more likely to escalate.

"There is no question...that Putin is responsible for war crimes -- and not just this particular war crime, but also if one looks at the attacks on civilian infrastructure, the fact that clearly, although Putin did not necessarily say, 'Bomb hospitals' and the like, he absolutely has done nothing to prevent hospitals being bombed," Galeotti said.

The warrant is "precisely a symbol of the degree to which his regime...has absolutely transgressed across what we now think of as genuine global values," he said. "It is also symbolic of a degree of isolation and a degree of international, frankly, revulsion."

'Making Putin's Personal Incentives Irrelevant'

But while the court decision "has been welcomed by some precisely because of the idea that in closes the ring tighter on Vladimir Putin, that it makes him all the more aware of the fact that there can be no return to status quo, and therefore, for some, it should undermine his will to continue to fight the war," Galeotti said, he added: "My big fear is that in fact the exact opposite is true."

"Sure, he cannot go back to anything like the status quo ante, absolutely," Galeotti said. "But on the other hand, the worse that...any kind of peacetime situation and outcome looks to Putin, the less incentive he has to accept that on anything other than his own terms.... So, I do wonder, does this actually make peace harder rather than easier?

"It's one of the awful head vs. heart, justice vs. pragmatism dilemmas, and it is a really tough call."

Whatever the degree of Putin's determination to keep the war going despite the actual interests of Russia and its people, some Western analysts say the best way to end it is to help Ukraine win -- or at least make gains that could prompt him to change his calculus.

"Putin is likely to continue the war in Ukraine -- not because it is in Russia's interest but because it is in his personal interest. Fighting on makes sense for Putin for one fundamental reason: wartime autocrats rarely lose power," Andrea Kendall-Taylor, a senior fellow and director of the Transatlantic Security Program at the Center for a New American Security, and Erica Frantz, an associate professor of political science at Michigan State University, wrote in a March 23 article in the journal Foreign Affairs.

"The most promising path to stop the war, then, is through greater U.S. and European support to Kyiv. Providing more assistance could help Ukraine win a decisive military victory, making Putin's personal incentives irrelevant," Kendall-Taylor and Frantz wrote. "And even if Ukraine determines that that it cannot expel Russian forces entirely from its territory, positioning Kyiv to threaten Putin with a clear battlefield defeat should encourage him to partake in negotiations on terms that are more favorable to Ukraine.

"Until Putin faces a credible threat, he will have every reason to continue the war," they added.

That's it from me this week.

If you want to know more, catch up on my podcast The Week Ahead In Russia, out every Monday, here on our site or wherever you get your podcasts (Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Pocket Casts).

Yours,

Steve Gutterman