Are Putin’s Nuclear Threats Working?

In The Russian Way of Deterrence, Dima Adamsky has written the authoritative account of how Russia thinks about strategic deterrence.

Adamsky is a Soviet-born scholar based in Israel. As one of the leading analysts of Russian defense policy, his insights are sought out around the world, including by the Pentagon. The central theoretical argument of the book is that the United States must tailor its understanding of adversaries’ deterrence strategies.

It has become commonplace in the strategic deterrence community to argue that Washington should “tailor” its deterrence strategies. In other words, the best way to deter China from invading Taiwan might be different from how one should go about deterring Russia from attacking Estonia. They are different countries with different values, goals, and risk tolerances. Threats that might deter one country, for example, might provoke another. Deterrence is not one-size-fits-all.

Similarly, Adamsky argues that analysts should also tailor their understanding of how adversaries go about trying to deter and coerce the United States. Simply “mirror imaging” and assuming that Moscow and Beijing think about deterrence in the same way that Washington does would be a mistake, and it could lead to potentially disastrous outcomes when the West misreads the signals that its adversaries are trying to send.

For example, one side might think that placing nuclear weapons on alert is a deterrent signal meant to de-escalate a conflict, but an adversary might miss the signal altogether if it is too subtle—or worse, mistake the preparations for an impending nuclear attack and strike first, resulting in catastrophe.

In his new book, Adamsky provides us an extended example by presenting a tailored understanding of Russian deterrence strategy.

The Russian Way of Deterrence: Strategic Culture, Coercion, and War, Dmitry (Dima) Adamsky, Stanford University Press, 226 pp., $26, October 2023.

He begins by noting that deterrence theory was not part of Soviet thinking during the Cold War. This is a fact known by specialists, but it may come as a surprise to a wider audience. In the United States, scholars and strategists—such as Thomas Schelling and Herman Kahn—were developing elaborate theories about how the United States could use nuclear threats and limited nuclear war to signal its intentions, climb up and down escalation ladders, deter adversaries, and manage conflict.

Washington made the mistake, however, of mirror imaging. It wrongly assumed that the Soviet Union largely shared these understandings. In fact, Adamsky argues that authorities in Moscow had rejected deterrence theory outright. Soviet military officials conceived of nuclear weapons as large artillery shells. Russian war plans called for large-scale nuclear strikes in Europe at the outset of any hostilities as part of a plan to fight and win a nuclear war.

It was not until after the end of the Cold War that deterrence theory began to catch on in Russia. Facing a fresh strategic problem (how to offset the West’s newfound conventional military superiority), Russian strategists looked to deterrence as the answer. As Adamsky frequently reminds the reader, this means that Russian deterrence theory is five decades younger, and less mature, than its Western variant.

If there were standout intellectual figures in these debates—the equivalent of a Kahn or Schelling in the United States—Adamsky does not identify them by name. He instead credits “Senior and midcareer General Staff and Ministry of Defense (MoD) officers, along with experts from government affiliated think tanks.”

Starting in a different time period and with a different set of problems to address in the post-Cold War era (namely, how to reclaim Russian imperial glory in the face of NATO and its superior conventional military capabilities), Adamsky describes how Russian deterrence theory developed in unique ways. It is more holistic and cross-domain in nature, and it integrates all elements of national power, including ­information operations, conventional military power, and nuclear weapons at the high end of conflict.

While Westerners distinguish between deterrence (defensive threats meant to maintain the status quo) and compellence threats (offensive threats meant to compel an adversary into doing one’s bidding), Russians make no such distinction, often employing the same term—sderzhivanie—for both.

Russian theory blurs the distinction between peacetime and wartime, holding that persistent engagement with the adversary—especially at lower levels, such as information operations—is a necessary part of shaping operations that contribute to a broader strategic deterrence. Like in the West, Russians believe that deterrence is about influencing the calculations of an adversary, but Adamsky argues that Russia places more emphasis on misinformation and disinformation to deceive an adversary into holding a false perception of reality. On this and other arguments, the author could have done more to provide concrete examples to make the conceptual arguments more concrete for readers.

As a nuclear deterrence scholar, I was familiar with these various strands of Russian thinking, but Adamsky pulls them all together in a single, tidy package. Moreover, he goes beyond merely describing Russian strategic thinking and also traces its intellectual roots, from Russia’s Orthodox religious traditions to Cold War military strategy and beyond.

For example, Adamsky attributes Russian President Vladimir Putin’s recent public embrace of Russian Orthodox Christianity as part and parcel of Russian deterrence theory. Of course, Putin is no saint, but he has presented himself as a man of faith and tied his aggressive Russian nationalism to the church.

According to Adamsky’s book, Putin’s public religiosity is in part about buttressing Russian strategic deterrence. If he is not a rational actor, but rather a messianic leader on a divinely inspired mission, then perhaps he cannot be deterred by promises and threats of earthly costs and benefits. It is the Western “madman theory” donning a kalimavkion.

Does Russian strategic deterrence theory work in practice? Adamsky assesses that Russia excels at accurately analyzing an enemy, understanding its vulnerabilities, and developing a strategy to exploit weaknesses. He also concludes, however, that while arguably holding a more cohesive and elegant deterrence theory than the West, Russia is often ineffective at putting theory into practice. Adamsky argues that a disconnect between elegant theory and careless execution is an ingrained trait in Russia’s managerial tradition.

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Russia’s bungled invasion of Ukraine seems to provide many recent examples of this phenomenon. Recall Moscow’s envisioned lighting strike on Kyiv, which was instead bogged down in a more than 30-mile-long convoy of stalled military vehicles at the outset of the war.

Most important, Adamsky argues, Russia lacks an effective means of analyzing the success of its deterrence strategy, thus often causing the country to overshoot. Actions that Moscow intends to signal as deterrent measures to force the West to back off are instead misperceived by the West as acts of aggression that only provoke the West into further strengthening itself against Russia.

But Adamsky argues that this problem is not limited to Russia, and he asserts that not even the United States has a robust system in place to consistently and accurately measure deterrence success and failure. Just as armies have processes for conducting battle damage assessments after military action, Adamsky recommends that countries put in place a formal process for assessing the effectiveness of their deterrence operations.

The bulk of the manuscript was written before the start of Russia’s February 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine, but the author added a penultimate chapter offering a preliminary application of his framework to the ongoing conflict.

Adamsky argues that Putin’s peace offering—demanding that the West essentially undo its Cold War victory and grant Russia a sphere of influence in Eastern Europe—on the eve of the war was sincere, and not merely a pretext for invasion. He believes Putin genuinely hoped that the West would agree to renegotiate Europe’s security architecture in Moscow’s favor. As a next step, when that did not work, Putin turned to a full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Adamsky contends that the invasion was merely the next step in Putin’s elaborate coercive playbook to revise the European security architecture—and not yet evidence that his coercive threats did not work. For Russia, deterrence operations can include the use of military force up to and including nuclear strikes, and whether Putin’s coercive campaign ultimately succeeds or fails will now be determined on the battlefield in Ukraine.

Indeed, Adamsky argues that, by employing nuclear threats and other coercive tools, Russia has so far succeeded in deterring direct Western intervention in Ukraine’s defense. After all, U.S. President  Joe Biden and other Western leaders affirm the value of Putin’s nuclear threats every time they cite fears of “escalation” as the reason for restraining their support to Ukraine. Still, Adamsky maintains, Putin has not yet succeeded in his broader attempts to compel Ukraine’s surrender, which remains his primary goal.

Russian troops in Ukraine reportedly committed unspeakable and systematic war crimes in Bucha and elsewhere, but Adamsky argues that intentional victimization of civilians is not part of Russian strategic doctrine. He reasons that the soldiers themselves likely took the initiative in conducting these heinous acts, which were then tolerated by higher-ranking military commanders. This interpretation is consistent with a broader body of academic literature, which finds that civilian victimization in war is generally ineffective and often counterproductive.

The Russian Way of Deterrence is dense and scholarly, and it can be repetitive at times. For nonacademic readers looking to quickly glean the key insights, the conclusion offers a comprehensive summary of the book.

For specialist readers, I highly recommend it—even if it may not make the list when Foreign Policy’s editors ask me to suggest fun beach reads this summer. (Apart from those planning to vacation in coastal Crimea, who would be well advised to pack a copy.)

This book is essential reading for deterrence scholars and strategists as well as anyone who wants to better understand the sources of Russian foreign-policy and military strategy. Adamsky distills a lifetime of learning into this short and rich book, and we can all benefit from his wisdom.