President Vladimir Putin has promised Russians a place in heaven. Yes, it would appear, all Russians.
Speaking at the Valdai Discussion Club, an annual gathering of international Russia experts, Putin answered a series of softball questions from a veteran foreign-affairs journalist, followed by a series of equally unchallenging questions, peppered with praise for the president, from the audience. Altogether, Putin spent three and a half hours onstage.
About a third of the way through, Putin conjured the spectre of nuclear war, most likely with the United States, though he didn’t name the enemy explicitly. “As martyrs, we will go to heaven,” he promised. “And they will just croak because they won’t even have time to repent.”
Putin indicated that he was explaining the Russian military doctrine, which, he said, doesn’t reserve the right of first strike for Russia. “I want everyone present here, and everyone who is going to analyze every word I say here and use it in one way or another in their own storytelling, to keep in mind: our concept of using nuclear arms does not allow for a preventive strike,” he said. “Our concept is responsive and reciprocal.”
He then explained what he meant. If an enemy fired a nuclear missile, all of Russia’s surveying and computing minds would go to work to calculate its trajectory and velocity. “And then when we are certain—all of this is happening over the course of several seconds—that the target of the attack is Russian territory, then and only then do we respond with a strike. This will be the reciprocal counter strike. Why counter? Because they are flying at us, and counter is the flying [sic] in the direction of the aggressor. Of course this will be a global catastrophe, but I repeat, we can’t initiate this catastrophe because we don’t have preventive strike. Yes, this is a situation where we are kind of waiting around for someone to use nuclear weapons against us and aren’t doing anything ourselves. Yes, sure. But the aggressor still must know that retribution is inevitable, that he will be annihilated, while we are the victims of aggression.”
And this is when he said, “As martyrs, we will go to heaven and they will just croak, because they won’t even have time to repent.”
I quote Putin at length here, in my own translation, to give a sense of the preposterousness of his speech, which the official Kremlin translation smooths over: using the word “perish” where he said “croak,” for example, and introducing grammatical coherence where Putin’s speech had none. But what makes this portion of Putin’s talk—the portion that made headlines in both state-controlled and independent Russian-language media—particularly bizarre, is that Putin was misrepresenting the Russian nuclear doctrine.
Russia strengthened the language of its military doctrine in December, 2014. The unclassified portion of the document identifies NATO as the source of the primary threat to Russia’s security. On the subject of a nuclear strike, it says the following: “The Russian Federation reserves the right to use nuclear weapons in response to an attack on Russia and/or its allies involving the use of nuclear weapons or other weapons of mass destruction as well as in the case of aggression against the Russian Federation with the use of conventional weapons when the existence of the state itself is threatened. Decisions regarding the use of nuclear weapons are made by the President of the Russian Federation.”
In other words, Russia reserves the right to use nuclear weapons in response to anything it interprets as aggression, whether or not the aggression involves nuclear weapons or even Russia itself. In still plainer words, the Russian military doctrine provides for the possibility of a first nuclear strike, and Putin was lying.
Why would Putin lie about the nuclear doctrine? If one were inclined to see cunning strategy in the actions of the Russian President, one might imagine that he was signalling to the world—which is to say, to Washington—that Russia is backing away from its most aggressive positions. One might even see a backhanded peace offering in Putin’s promise that Russians will go to heaven while Americans croak.
But I think the explanation is simpler. Putin lies because it is his habit. He lies because he has no reason not to: no one will call him to account. His speech is always a demonstration of the emptiness of words—his own and other people’s. The only thing that matters is power—in this case, both his Presidential power and Russia’s military power. He just chose a particularly colorful way to remind the world that we are always one step away from a nuclear catastrophe.
