'Escalate to De-Escalate'
Russian conflict escalation management & Russo-Ukraine War
March 2023
As Ukraine continues making headway pushing back Russian troops across the Russo-Ukraine border, as well as defending against a joint Belarussian-Russian attack from the north, they are still being bombarded by rockets, missiles, and bombings from Russian air force & tactical missile units. Needing to strike a decisive blow to weaken this new combined enemy, the Ukrainian armed forces target command and control systems & airbases in Belarus & Russia which are striking at Kyiv & the frontline. A series of ATACMS missiles with a 190-mile range, newly given to Ukraine following the new front from Belarus, blast their way across the border and land on systems near Gomel, Belarus, and Belograd, Russia. Facing growing pressure from oligarchs and generals to end the war quickly as their fortunes dwindle and they lose access to their money in Western countries, Putin gives the order to use tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine, in hopes to bring NATO/Ukraine to the table. At 11 pm that same day, Russia launches two 25 KT nuclear rockets from their 22-26 Iskander missile systems located in Donetsk at troops concentrations in Kherson with a ground burst and over the Black Sea as a mid-air burst. In response, the United States & NATO allies target Russia’s fleet in the Black Sea with conventional weapons. Russia, having expected this response, had moved most of its fleet into port with a small contingent remaining near Crimea. In response to the attack, Russia proposes an immediate ceasefire & asks for the new lines to be drawn at their prior lines (before the Ukrainian advance) in Ukrainian territory. The West, seeing a chance to prevent a worldwide nuclear war, agrees with the proposal, cutting Kyiv out of the decision-making process. This act ends up ending the year-long conflict while allowing Putin and Russia to save face with what is perceived through local propaganda-filled eyes as a victory.
The scenario above is highly unlikely and a work of pure fiction, however, the premise it’s built on is a Russian doctrine that we will discuss today.
Defending the Motherland…by all costs
On September 30, 2022, President Vladimir Putin & the Duma of the Russian Federation formally announced the annexation of the Luhansk and Donetsk regions of Ukraine– where fighting has been ongoing since the initial Russian invasion in 2014 – as well as Kherson and Zaporizhzhia in Southern Ukraine, in which Russia took over shortly after the February 2022 invasion. This is his second illegal annexation of Ukrainian territory with the Crimean Annexation occurring in 2014. This annexation follows in the steps of a massive Ukrainian counteroffensive in the South that drove Russian forces back across the border in some parts & has resulted in a further demoralization of the Russian army fighting in Ukraine.
In his announcement and in the days prior and following, Putin and other Russian leadership ramped up threats of escalation, including ‘retaliatory’ nuclear use, and also accused Ukraine of planning an act of mass destruction using a dirty bomb. More recently, however, this rhetoric has died down, but the threat of Russian use of a tactical (i.e., 15 KT [Hiroshima-yield] or lower) nuclear weapon in Ukraine persists at a much higher probability than in years past.
Nuclear Weapons: Defensive Use Only except…
In 1982, the USSR formally issued an official no-first-strike policy in regard to nuclear weapons with a statement from Soviet Premium Leonid Brezhnev pledging to not preemptively use nuclear weapons. This held throughout the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1992, to a formal reversal in 1993 by the Russian Duma when the Russian Federation armed forces were weak and vulnerable to a possible US, NATO, or Chinese attack.
Russia continues to hold an official stance of a ‘defensive’ military doctrine, though the many wars of aggression through former USSR satellites speak very differently, and has published in their official nuclear posture (most recently in 2014) the following (starting in paragraph 27):
The Russian Federation shall reserve the right to use nuclear weapons in response to the use of nuclear and other types of weapons of mass destruction against it and/or its allies, as well as in the event of aggression against the Russian Federation with the use of conventional weapons when the very existence of the state is in jeopardy.
So in summary, Russia would use nuclear weapons in the following cases:
Attack by a WMD (nuclear, chemical, biological, or any current other classification of WMD) on it and/or allies
A conventional war that threatens the existence of the Russian state
The problem, however, lies in the broad implications of the second ‘reason.’
What exactly is the state, how is it defined, and what constitutes its existence? Who determines this? The only mention in the above doctrine in where the power to use nuclear weapons states just below the above:
The decision to use nuclear weapons shall be taken by the President of the Russian Federation.
Like the United States, the sole power of nuclear use lies in the office of the head of state- the President. For an authoritarian dictator like Putin, does the whole of the state lie within him? If he is threatened, either by internal or external forces, does that become a valid use of nuclear weapons? Unfortunately, for those of us not in the Kremlin circles, we don’t have a clear answer to this question.
What is Escalate to De-Escalate (EtDE)?
Though debated within national security & Russo-European scholars and think tanks, since the days of the Soviet Union, a majority belief is that Russia will escalate a conflict to a fever pitch and then offer de-escalation as a carrot to negotiate the end of hostilities in favorable terms to Russia (formerly, the USSR).
A scenario portrayed in several Warsaw-NATO conflict fiction books like The Third World War: August 1985 & Team Yankee: A Novel of World War III shows a conventional conflict with a Soviet/Warsaw Pact combined force through Western Germany, Netherlands, & Poland against an entrenched line of NATO troops. In both books, as Team Yankee is a tactical take on the strategic view in Third World War, the Soviet forces make significant gains with a much larger conventional force than NATO has on the Cold War frontlines. After several days of battle, and the beginning of the pushback on its forces to behind the earlier settled line between East & West Germany, the USSR targeted Manchester, England with a tactical nuclear submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBM) that kills hundreds of thousands. NATO forces then target Minsk with SLBMs themselves, obliterating it in the process. This escalation of the conflict, however, is defeated by an offer from Russia to go back to the status quo borders of the pre-NATO/Warsaw Pact conflict.
This scenario (minus the actual nuclear targets) was based on a general belief that if pushed into a losing scenario, the Soviet Union would employ a limited nuclear strike option (either key NATO military installations or a populous but not major and/or capital city) to NATO to the table for negotiation. In the first scenario with the use of nuclear weapons as a response to mainland Russian attacks and whose main use was intimidation of Ukraine & playing on the Western fear of a greater nuclear conflict to allow Russia to maintain it’s presence in the illegally annexed territory, giving Putin & his regime, a “win.”
How do you counter EtDE?
In his 2018 opinion piece in the online national security journal War on the Rocks, ‘Time to Terminate Escalate TO De-escalate — It’s Escalation Control,’ where he, ironically for my article, argues against the use of the term “Escalate to De-escalate”, Booz Allen Hamilton associate and US Army Officer Jay Ross, who argues for the term ‘escalation control’ and sees the Russian use of ‘escalation control’ applied to all weapons, not just nuclear, states the following on countering Russia:
[The escalation control] approach does have a weakness: It relies on a reactive adversary with known or accurately predicted thresholds. The United States has to decide which escalation thresholds it wants to communicate clearly, and which ones it wants to keep ambiguous to deter Russia. This will be complex since it requires accounting for newer domains and means of conflict. It will also require making some tough internal calls about what is important enough to the United States to justify certain actions and certain risks, and then deciding how or whether to communicate those thresholds. Communicating to Russia that any malign act will result in direct military action is not credible. The lines need to be drawn, at least internally, and then the United States needs to decide whether those thresholds are best served by communicating clarity or ambiguity to Russia.
In short, the United States and NATO must communicate both overtly while still being ambiguous on our thresholds for nuclear weapon use. I see this as and keeping our ‘first strike’ option open while still communicating clearly, where needed, what our thresholds are without giving Russia enough free reign to continue its conquest of Eastern Europe. As a parent, you learn the value in both clear and ambiguous/open-ended communication as they may know the absolute boundary but they will (most likely) keep a greater distance from the more ambiguous boundary. For example, you may communicate an absolute boundary, like “Don’t run across the street in front of traffic,” but leave some ambiguity in interpretation to prevent getting right up to the line on another boundary, like with the same rule on the road, but on how close they can get before they get into trouble. While an incomplete example, it illustrates the use of words and communications in foreign affairs to deter where weapons may escalate.
Conclusion & Opinion
NATO and the United States must develop a clear strategy for countering the threat of Russian escalation from a conventional conflict to a nuclear one, even if limited and not against a NATO ally (e.g., Ukraine). Russian military leadership must be held accountable for ‘obeying orders’ if such an order comes from Putin or whoever may be sitting in the Kremlin. Finally, we must display a strong resolve to respond no matter the cost to Russian aggression lest they see compliance as a weakness or appeasement, which would only strengthen the weakened lion at this point.