Vladimir Putin on Russian nuclear doctrine: what was new in his Q&A at the Valdai Discussion Club?

Guest Post by Gilbert Doctorow

Thursday, 5 October, was the high point in the 20^th edition of the Valdai Discussion Club annual meeting when President Putin delivered a 30 minute address to the Plenary Session and then held a 3 hour long Q&A with the 140 invited guests. It was moderated by the Club’s program director, the widely published international affairs analyst Fyodor Lukyanov, though Putin himself intervened from time to time to designate the next questioner from among those he recognized in the audience.

This featured event in the President’s autumn agenda was first held in the resort village of Valdai, hence the name. Valdai is located midway between Petersburg and Moscow and was beloved by Putin at all times for a few days of secluded rest except in April-May when the birch trees, to which he is allergic, are in bloom. A special train spur would take him to the edge of the property made available to him there.  The Discussion Group event quickly outgrew the on-site facilities in Valdai and was moved down to Sochi, the Russian president’s equivalent of Camp David in the USA, to which foreign statesmen and other highly distinguished guests can be invited for talks.

To be more precise, the actual venue this past week was in nearby Krasnaya Polyana, a ski resort in the mountains overlooking Sochi that has been developed for year-round recreation. We are told that the participants came from 42 countries, including those nowadays designated as “unfriendly.”   As is customary, not everyone invited was a ‘friend of Russia,” without reference to where they come from.

As is customary, the entire group consisted mostly of university people, think tank research fellows and diplomats. With the exception of the last-named, they are not the President’s regular interlocutors, who are now more commonly government officials, business people, soldiers and officers, and schoolchildren at Russia’s cutting edge educational establishments. But he has no difficulty breaking the ice and finding common ground with intellectuals.

It would be reasonable to assume that there is no pre-agreement with participants over what they will ask the President. However, each of them has a record of publications or of previous appearances at the Valdai conferences, which means that their questions can be anticipated and Putin prepares accordingly.  Nonetheless, a few used the occasion to pose hostile questions, and I mention this below. No matter; Putin handles them all with aplomb.  He speaks extemporaneously and without notes, all of which is enormously impressive to anyone with an objective eye.

The entire event was broadcast live on Russian state television and has been made available online by various Russian news portals.  I have consulted the following from Komsomolskaya Pravda:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-GYbhHVOPVo

For those who want an English language transcript of the Valdai proceedings, I refer you to the President’s website, which is putting up the translation in segments:

http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts/72444

Putin’s introductory speech and the questions posed touched upon a great number of separate issues. It is interesting to note that yesterday’s Financial Times and New York Times did not have a word to say about Putin’s appearance before the Valdai group. By contrast, CNN and Euronews did report on it  yesterday morning, but they both focused on just one item from the Q&A, while ignoring everything else. What they found newsworthy was Putin’s answer to a question about the fate of the Wagner Group following the fatal air crash several months ago that killed Dmitry Prigozhin and several others from among its founders and leading personalities. Their coverage homed in on Putin’s revealing the finding by the official investigation into the accident, namely that the recovered bodies had in them fragments of a hand grenade.  Putin said that this indicated the plane was not brought down by some external factor. Let us remember that Western media had suggested soon after the crash that it had been hit by a missile fired by the Russian Army, that Prigozhin was a victim of the President’s revenge for his mutiny.

But within the topic of Wagner, Western media missed entirely other important revelations and Putin’s own speculation on the incident. He said he regretted that the investigators had not checked for the presence of alcohol or narcotics in the corpses. And in this connection he said that 5 kilograms of cocaine had been found by police when they searched Wagner Group offices after the plane crash. The clear intimation was that the explosion that brought down the plane was due to someone on board, acting ‘under the influence,’ and pulling the pin on a grenade.

What the Western media also missed with respect to the Wagner story was Putin’s overall remarks on how Russia had no laws sanctioning a ‘private military company,’ that this was a big mistake because those who fought valiantly within Wagner on the Ukrainian front were given no social protection by the state and were being paid in cash with no control over how fairly compensation was allocated. He said it was still not clear whether any such operation would be allowed in the future, but that in the meantime several thousand Wagner fighters had now joined the regular Russian army under normal contracts like other volunteers.

And with respect to the regular Russian army itself, Putin said the past several months of its successfully repelling the Ukrainian counter-offensive and dealing out massive losses to the enemy showed that it was fully capable of ensuring the success of Russia’s Special Military Operation without mercenary groups like Wagner at its side.

In what follows, like Euronews, I also will focus on one of the many topics that were discussed in the Valdai event yesterday, namely the subject of Russia’s nuclear doctrine, which Putin clarified in a very important aspect for relations with the United States. I doubt that officials in the Pentagon or the State Department will have overlooked what he said yesterday. Unlike Euronews, I will close this essay with a brief overview of Putin’s introductory speech, as well as some of what I consider to have been the most interesting answers to other questions.

*****

Sergei Karaganov is a well-known Russian political scientist who for many years allowed himself to be cultivated and flattered by admirers abroad. They enjoyed his novel and frequently changing models of a future world order, as well as his talents as a public speaker. And he was careful to distance himself from the Putin regime. I saw him in person when he was one of the favored guests at an annual conference of a Social Democratic Party think tank in a fashionable suburb of Frankfurt to which I was also invited, mistakenly I would say, by the organizers.

As I wrote several months ago, in the current very patriotic mood of Russia, Karaganov clearly felt it was appropriate to polish his credentials as a native son. He created a storm at home and abroad with his proposal to do the unthinkable and put the fear of Russia back into the West by actually using tactical nuclear weapons to demonstrate their raw power, whether on a test field or against the weaker but more aggressive NATO member states Poland and Romania, where the United States has built missile bases directed at Russia. Talking heads in Washington were sounding alarms and some of Karaganov’s peers within Russia who were outraged by his irresponsibility issued a public rebuke to him.

When Putin identified Karaganov in the audience yesterday and invited him to ask a question, one didn’t have to think twice what that question would be. Indeed Karaganov enquired whether it was not time for Russia to change its approach to nuclear arms and restore their deterrent strength in the eyes of Western elites who repeat endlessly that Russia is weak.

Vladimir Putin took his time and gave Karaganov and the audience a very complete answer, beginning with a summary of the two principal points of the doctrine guiding Russia’s possible use of nuclear arms.

First, Russia will launch a nuclear attack against any country which, according to radar indications, has launched one or more missiles against Russia. The response will be instantaneous, said Putin. And those in power abroad understand perfectly well that Russia will be launching hundreds of missiles coming at them from all directions so that the end result will be their total destruction.  There is no need for Russia to say or do more to make its deterrence respected.

Second, Russia will launch a nuclear attack against any country or countries that threaten its continued existence as a sovereign state, regardless of whether the threat posed is by nuclear arms or conventional arms. Since there is no such existential threat to Russia today, there is no reason to brandish nuclear arms.

There would be no news here if Vladimir Putin did not proceed to a further explanation of what changes in nuclear policy are now being prepared with respect to one of the few remaining set of “handrails” that were established in past decades to prevent an all-out nuclear arms race between the super powers: the test ban treaty.

As he explained, this treaty was concluded long ago between the United States and Russia. It was both signed and ratified by Russia. However, the United States only signed it and never ratified it. Now some in the Russian military are demanding that testing be restarted and the treaty becomes inconvenient. They want to conduct tests to be sure that new cutting-edge strategic weapons systems like the very heavy ICBM Sarmat or the global range Burevestnik cruise missile which Russia is about to make the mainstays of its nuclear missile forces actually will deliver the punch as intended. Moreover, Russia assumes that the very same question has been advanced in the United States by its armed forces, which are not de jure restrained by a treaty which the country did not ratify. For all of these reasons, Vladimir Putin is about to put before the Duma a bill to revoke Russia’s ratification of the test ban treaty. Washington was put on notice yesterday: we are on the cusp of an unrestrained nuclear arms race in which Russia presently has a vast lead in delivery systems.

Did any of our mass media notice?  Apparently after a delay, they did:  Bloomberg  posted a video on the subject on their youtube account late very early in the morning yesterday; NBC did the same in the afternoon.

*****

The theme of this year’s Valdai Club conference was “Fair multipolarity: how to ensure security and development for everyone” and this was what Putin spoke to in his introductory address. His speech was intellectually challenging, but clumsy because it put together unrelated ideas.

The speech represents the latest state of Putin’s thinking processes about Russia’s relations with the West that he first made public at his address to Munich Security Conference in February 2007.  In that speech, he set out Russia’s rejection of U.S. global hegemony based on the false notion of its exceptionalism.  What he announced yesterday was Russia’s rejection of the West in its entirety, meaning not only the hegemon but also the hegemon’s “satellites,” the former colonial powers of Europe which, in his view, derive their prosperity from centuries long plundering of the rest of the world.

There were echoes in this speech of what Putin had said in his address to the Business Group of the BRICS summit in South Africa a little more than a month ago when he condemned the West for the neocolonial mindset in its treatment of the rest of the world. Now he went a step further and conflated neocolonial thinking with ‘bloc’ mentality, i.e., the creation by the United States of military alliances in Europe, in Asia that promote a ‘we versus them’ spirit, that identify an enemy for the sake of rallying the bloc members around the boss country and for the purpose of maintaining control over the populace within their countries.  Russia, China, India and others are named as the enemy when it suits the United States for their refusal to be subservient and to sacrifice their national interests to the interests of Washington. I assume that the mention of ‘bloc mentality’ comes from his talks with President Xi, for whom this is a regular talking point. Or it was an attempt to catch the attention of the Chinese public.

In the Valdai Discussion Club, Putin is speaking to intellectuals, as I noted above, and the greater part of his speech was philosophical, setting out his cultural relativism views which are in direct contradiction with the present day universalism of the West and with the End of History story that Francis Fukuyama popularized at the beginning of the 1990s when the United States and others were looking for a new road map, for a new ideology to guide and justify the U.S.-led world now that the bipolar world of the USSR and the USA had come to an end and mankind seemed to have settled on a single common ideology, which we now would call “neo-Conservative.”

There also was in Putin’s speech a reflection of ideas that Sam Huntington popularized in his 1990s book Clash of Civilizations. After all, Huntington was saying that there are a number of different civilizational models operating in the current world. In Putin’s speech that diversity is precisely what needs to be cultivated for there to be fair multipolarity in the incoming world order. However, his notion of civilization is identified with single nations rather than with clusters of nations, as in Huntington, or in the 19^th century political thinkers from whom Huntington borrowed the concept.

Per Putin, no civilization is better or worse than others. Each is self-sufficient and thereby sovereign while at the same time having some interdependence with others. Each civilization rests on the national traditions and values of its bearers. Each deserves to feel secure, which is possible only when one state is not trying to enhance its own security at the expense of others.

The ideas in Putin’s speech are not his final word on the subject. He has put the blame for the confrontation with the West on elites, while insisting that Russia has many friends in Europe and fellow believers in the Christian civilization that they once shared with Russia, before they tore up their own cultural roots and lost their sense of reality. The colonialists may yet be forgiven their past plundering if they give up their arrogance today and lend support to the incoming multipolar world order.

*****

Putin was on firmer ground in his answers to questions from the audience.

A case in point was his response to a question from Margarita Simonyan, director of RT in which, speaking as an ethnic Armenian, she harshly criticized prime minister of Armenia Nikol Pashinyan for his betrayal of fellow Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh that enabled the Azeri armed occupation of the territory and consequent flight of the 120,000 ethnic Armenians in this enclave across the border into Armenia proper. She insinuated that Pashinyan was put in power by the West and that he had sold out the Armenian population of Nagorno-Karabakh from the beginning.

Putin did not hesitate to dispute these allegations from one of Russia’s most senior journalists.  Per Putin, Pashinyan was fairly elected by his nation and for a long time had taken no action that would compromise the interests of the Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh. Putin said that from his several meetings with Pashinyan, he knew that the Armenian leader had no intentions to do harm to his compatriots living in Azerbaijan. The problem arose when Pashinyan met in Prague with President of the European Council Charles Michel who persuaded him to publicly acknowledge that Nagorno-Karabakh is an integral part of Azerbaijan, and that the country’s borders dating from the break-up of the USSR in 1991 are recognized by Armenia.  Regrettably, Michel and Pashinyan did nothing to prepare for the likely consequence of such recognition, namely the attempt by President Aliyev of Azerbaijan to exercise control over the rebel province by using armed force.

The likelihood of ethnic cleansing or voluntary departure of the Armenian population should have been anticipated and measures put in place to deal with it.  Though Putin did not go into what these measures could have been, it would have been logical for Pashinyan to demand that Baku provide a financial settlement to allow the Nagorno-Karabakh population to resettle with dignity and with lodgings should they depart. As it is, the Azeris will now take over all the houses and apartments left behind by the refugees without any compensation being paid. Relatively rich Azerbaijan could have afforded this. Relatively poor Armenia cannot afford it.  And the EU has not offered a single euro to help with this. It has only offered some fighter jets to Armenia, which would be useless in a war and can only aggravate relations with Baku, while it cackles over how Russia has lost its influence in the region.

What I have said about Putin’s likely thinking on Armenian resettlement comes directly from what he said at the Valdai meeting about a similar problem that Russia itself experienced at the close of the Cold War when President Yeltsin withdrew Soviet armed forces from the Warsaw Pact countries. No provision had been made for taking in the several hundred thousand soldiers, officers and their families upon their return to Russia. As a result, they returned to live “in open fields” under beggarly conditions. This disastrous failure is seen today as one of Yeltsin’s greatest crimes against the nation. There are those who believe that Moscow should have kept its troops in Germany, Poland and elsewhere until an agreement was made on real, as opposed to token compensation to defer the expenses of resettlement.

Of course, his own introductory speech and the Q&A provided Putin with an opportunity to comment on the Ukraine war, a war which he said was not at all about territorial ambition but about defending the Russian world, meaning the ethnic Russians and Russian speakers in the Donbas regions of Ukraine. They had been subjected to constant military aggression by the armed forces of Ukraine for nine years, with thousands of civilian deaths beginning in 2014. These atrocities attracted no interest in the West, until Russia decided to intervene militarily on their behalf by initiating the Special Military Operation in February 2022.

Another aspect of the SMO came up elsewhere in the Q&A when a German participant posed a rather aggressive, shall we say hostile question to Putin. He asked how Russia can condemn Ukraine for fascism when they themselves maintain friendly relations with the Alternativ für Deutschland party (AfD), which is openly fascist.  Putin asked him a question in turn:  please be more concrete so we don’t talk in generalities; what exactly makes you think that the AfD is fascist?

The German questioner responded that you just had to look at a recent AfD rally in a town in East Germany where openly demonstrative neo-Nazis were in attendance.

Putin then responded with full blast, saying first that Russia’s friendship was with the AfD party leaders who are not fascist minded in any way. If some objectionable people show up at a rally, that tells you nothing. Moreover, looking at AfD developments in the past week it appeared that the party leaders themselves were victims of classic fascist style physical attack not perpetrators.  Indeed, at a pre-election rally in Bavaria this past week one of the two principal leaders was attacked and sent to hospital in intensive care.

Putin then redirected this discussion to Ukraine and the incident in the Canadian parliament a week ago when the entire House, led by its Speaker, hailed a former Waffen SS unit member for his fighting against Soviet Russia during WWII in defense of Ukrainian independence. The man, now 98 and a Canadian citizen, had necessarily participated in the butchery of Jews, Poles and other Untermenschen under guidance of Nazi German officers. The episode took place on the occasion of President Zelensky’s visit to Canada, and Zelensky himself was one of those applauding this Nazi, who was, Putin emphasized, not a Nazi sympathizer but an active Nazi collaborator in war crimes.

And Putin went on to drive home his point as it relates to the Ukraine war.  Here you had Zelensky, who has Jewish blood flowing through his veins, publicly applauding a man who took part in the Holocaust.  It is precisely for this reason that Russia is fighting the Kiev regime, to de-Nazify Ukraine.

One questioner from the floor asked Putin for his thoughts on what seems to be a historic turning point in Russian history as it breaks with a tradition of close integration with Europe established by Peter the Great when he established his “window on Europe,” St Petersburg.

In his response, Putin said that it was not Russia which closed a window on Europe, but Europe which has lowered a new Iron Curtain against Russia.  And in any case, Europe itself is no longer what it was. It has voluntarily abandoned its sovereignty and become a dependency of the United States. The result of the U.S. directed sanctions has been Europe’s loss of competitiveness.  Why do we need such a partner, he asked rhetorically. We have redirected our efforts to connect with rising Asia.  If Europe does not want us, we will not force our way in.

I also wish to call out Putin’s remarks in the Q&A with respect to the North Stream bombings and who was responsible. Putin’s point number one in finding those responsible is to remember Joe Biden’s words long before the bombing, that the North Stream pipelines would be stopped one way or another. And then whose interests are served by the destruction of these pipelines:  clearly it is U.S. interests because the U.S. is now the biggest supplier of natural gas to Europe. Meanwhile, the European investigation into the bombing is going nowhere and the results are unlikely to be made public.

But the most interesting part of his response was his statement that one of the Nord Stream II pipelines was not damaged in the terror attack and is fully functional. This is generally overlooked in the West. Said Putin, if Germany gives the go-ahead, then gas can be shipped via this surviving pipeline tomorrow, bringing 27 billion cubic meters of gas to Europe each year.

Finally, I note Putin’s response to a question from an Iraqi guest who asked what would be the subject of discussions during the soon awaited visit of the Iraqi premier to Moscow.

Putin said that, of course, cooperation in energy matters would be high on the list. Major Russian oil and gas companies are already very active in the country, with significant investments in production already made. But there would be other key topics, especially in the domain of logistics, meaning setting up new trade routes that will benefit both nations and the region.

There were in the three hours of Q&A many other interesting exchanges which readers can discover for themselves by consulting the transcripts and video as I mentioned above.

Putin’s stamina and mental focus over this long session were remarkable. It would be unfair to ask the same of readers of this newsletter.

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