Russian President Vladimir Putin doesn’t often submit to tough questioning these days, so a meeting on Tuesday with a group of so-called “Z-bloggers,” online military commentators who have provided constant and often critical commentary on Russia's war in Ukraine, was notably candid and even feisty at times. At one point, a visibly irritated Putin responded to a question about when Russia would push back against the West’s violations of its “red lines,” referring to military assistance to Ukraine that Russia has warned against.
Putin’s answer, more or less: We already have.
“The very execution of a special military operation” was a response to the West’s crossing of these lines, Putin said before arguing, as he frequently has, that Western countries started the conflict by backing anti-Russian forces within Ukraine. Putin also said that strikes “against Ukraine’s entire energy system” and an attack on the Ukrainian military’s intelligence directorate were responses to red-line violations.
Russian President Vladimir Putin meets with war correspondents in Moscow on June 13, 2023.
“We will continue to act surgically,” Putin said.
In other words, Russia will respond to perceived transgressions by the West by continuing to do what it’s already been doing. It was a far cry from the speech Putin gave immediately after the invasion last year, when he warned any countries that might “hinder us, and…create threats for our country” would meet “such consequences that you have never experienced in your history,” a not-so-subtle reference to Russia’s nuclear arsenal.
Putin’s response Tuesday also raised the question of whether Russia actually still has any “red lines” left.
Shifting lines
The threat that crossing Putin’s red lines might cause him to use nuclear weapons, launch attacks on other European countries, or otherwise escalate has hung over the war since the beginning.
At least two red lines have been observed: NATO refused Ukrainian requests to set up a no-fly zone over Ukraine in the war's early days, because of the likelihood it would lead to direct combat with Russian aircraft; and the U.S. and its allies haven’t deployed their own troops to Ukraine, a step President Joe Biden once warned could lead to “World War Three.” (Files leaked from the Pentagon earlier this year indicated that a few dozen NATO special operations forces were on the ground in Ukraine, though their governments haven't acknowledged these deployments.)
But otherwise, there appear to be almost no taboos left when it comes to foreign help for Ukraine.
From Javelin and Stinger anti-tank weapons to advanced artillery and battle tanks, western countries are now providing Ukraine with a range of weapons systems that officials once described as dangerously escalatory, and which the Kremlin warned would provoke a major response.
“Things are imaginable now that were simply not imaginable a year ago,” said Liana Fix, a fellow for Europe at the Council on Foreign Relations.
The latest “red-line” taboo to fall was the White House announcement last month that the U.S. would support the training of Ukrainian pilots on American-made F-16 fighter jets and allow other countries to transfer these jets to Ukraine. Biden had categorically ruled out F-16s just a few months earlier.
The next to fall may be the long-range Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS). Last year National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said sending these systems could lead to a “third world war,” because they would give Ukraine the ability to strike targets inside Russia. But pressure from Congress to provide them is growing and the United Kingdom has opened the door by providing its own long-range missile, the Storm Shadow, last month.
More than just the weapons
When it comes to Putin's red lines, it’s not just about the weapons. The U.S. is also reportedly providing the Ukrainians with detailed targeting assistance for rocket strikes.
And another supposed red line, attacks on Russia itself, is also looking a lot fuzzier these days.
Drones have repeatedly struck Russian targets just across the Ukrainian border, and some have even reached Moscow itself. Pro-Ukraine Russian militants, armed with western-provided weaponry, have launched repeated cross-border raids on Russian towns. And while Ukraine hasn't claimed responsibility for these strikes, and western governments don’t condone the use of their weapons to attack Russia, no one is trying very hard to distance themselves from these actions either.
And none of these developments have sparked World War III.
The nuclear question
As Putin indicated in his comments Tuesday, it’s not as if Russia has been restrained in its attacks on Ukraine. In May alone, Russia launched an estimated 400 drones and 160 missiles at Ukraine and subjected Kyiv to 20 nights of aerial attacks. If, as the Ukrainian government alleges and as western officials strongly suspect, Russians were behind the destruction of the Kakhovka dam on June 6, they may have unleashed Ukraine’s worst ecological disaster since Chernobyl.
But when policymakers discuss the risks around Russia’s red lines, there’s really only response they’re thinking about.
“When we talk about escalation, we’re really talking about nuclear,” said William Courtney, a former ambassador and White House Russia adviser now with the Rand Corporation. “There’s not much more escalation possible.”
The risk of nuclear use has not disappeared, as Putin underlined this week with the announcement that Russian nuclear weapons would soon be moved to Belarus. Also this week, the prominent and well-connected Russian commentator Sergey Karaganov published an article arguing that Russia should use nuclear weapons against western countries to “bring them to their senses” regarding their support for Ukraine.
But generally speaking, the Kremlin has made fewer overt nuclear threats than it did in the early days of the war and shown few signs that it is setting the stage for using them.
“It is clear by now that Russia cannot use nuclear weapons in or against Ukraine,” Pavel Podvig, an expert on Russian nuclear forces at the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research, told The Messenger. First, Podvig said, a nuclear strike “will have no military utility, and second, it would be universally condemned.”
If Putin were to actually use nuclear weapons, much if not all of the global support he still retains might evaporate. Most crucially, the government of China, which has largely backed the Kremlin’s line on the war, has repeatedly made clear that it does not approve of the use or threat to use nuclear weapons.
Other “red lines”?
In Podvig’s view, the one action that could change the Kremlin’s calculus when it comes to nuclear weapons would be a “direct US-NATO attack on Russia.”
But as Ukraine’s long-awaited counteroffensive ramps up, Courtney suggested another potential danger.
“One issue could be if Ukraine were to mount a frontal assault on Crimea. That would be very risky,” he said.
While the Russian government has illegally annexed a wide swath of territory in Eastern Ukraine, the Crimean Peninsula has been under Moscow’s control since its annexation in 2014. Crimea also has closer historical ties to Russia, and the Kremlin has attributed literally spiritual importance to keeping it in Russian hands.
“That could conceivably be relevant for Russian thinking around nuclear use,” Courtney said.
Technically speaking, Russia’s nuclear doctrine permits the use of these weapons only “when the very existence of the state is threatened.” But what would constitute such a threat? An attack on Moscow? On Crimea? A major battlefield setback in Ukraine?
Clearly, the West has been able to provide Ukraine with far more assistance than it was willing to at the war’s outset, without provoking a catastrophic response from Moscow. But whether that means the Kremlin’s threats have been empty, or there still is a line waiting to be crossed, is almost impossible to guess.
“The red lines are really just in the head of one person,” said CFR’s Fix. “The only person who knows where they are is Putin.”
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