Credit – Edouard Richard—Hans Lucas/Redux
The nuclear threats from Russia have come hard and fast in recent days. In a Telegram post last month, one member of the Kremlin’s security council even named a specific target in the heart of Europe, along with the time it would take a Russian missile to deliver a warhead to that spot. But European leaders barely seemed to flinch. In interviews with TIME, two of them brushed aside Vladimir Putin’s warnings of annihilation.
“I cannot assure you whether it is a bluff or not,” says Mette Frederiksen, the prime minister of Denmark, who has been among the most forceful advocates within the NATO alliance for stronger military aid to Ukraine. “But my take is that we can never let someone who does not respect democracy, human rights and all the things that we believe in — we cannot let him decide what the rest of us should do.”
Through its escalating threats of nuclear war, Russia has tried to stop Western countries from supporting Ukraine, particularly when it comes to long-distance strikes against Russian targets. On Sept. 19, the European Parliament passed a resolution that called for Ukraine to receive the weapons and permission to launch such strikes, and the response from Moscow was unusually blunt.
“What the European Parliament is calling for will lead to a world war with the use of nuclear weapons,” Vyacheslav Volodin, the speaker of the Russian parliament and a member of the state’s security council, wrote on Telegram. One of Russia’s intercontinental ballistic missiles, he added, would only take three minutes and 20 seconds to deliver a warhead to Strasbourg, France, the home of the European Parliament. “Do European citizens want the war to reach their homes?” Volodin asked.
But the President of the European Parliament, Roberta Metsola, did not seem alarmed or even particularly surprised by the apocalyptic rhetoric. “It’s a typical reaction,” she told TIME a few days later. “It’s confrontational.” Pressed on whether she took such threats seriously, Metsola added: “If that’s going to be the increasing rhetoric, that’s something we’re going to have to be prepared for.”
The measured response was in line with a growing trend among Western officials. For many of them, Vladimir Putin has begun to sound like the boy who cried nukes too many times, dulling the impact of his own nuclear deterrent and allowing many Europeans to shed their fear of it. “Fear and leadership do not go hand in hand,” says Frederiksen, the Danish PM. The Western habit of worrying about Putin’s red lines, she added, had caused too many delays in support for Ukraine. “The only red line I see in this war has already been crossed when they attacked Ukraine.”
The Kremlin, clearly aware that its red lines are being ignored, has continued drawing more of them. A few days after Volodin’s threat against the city of Strasbourg, Putin told a televised meeting of his security council that Russia would need to lower its threshold for using nuclear arms. If faced with a large-scale attack with conventional weapons, such as missiles or even drones, Putin suggested, Russia could respond with an atomic bomb.
That formal change in Russia’s nuclear doctrine — which had previously envisioned a nuclear response only in the event of an existential threat to Russia — grabbed headlines and stirred a fresh round of debate in Western capitals. But it did not cause a discernible change in tone from Ukraine or its closest allies. “Russia no longer has any instruments to intimidate the world apart from nuclear blackmail,” Andriy Yermak, the chief of staff to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, said in response to Putin’s latest threat. “These instruments will not work.”
Correction, October 3
The original version of this story misspelled the surname of the Danish Prime Minister. She is Mette Frederiksen, not Frederikson.
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