Russia has been making more nuclear threats lately but there’s a growing sense in Moscow that they aren’t working like they used to. Putin has become the boy who cried nuke.
When Russian President Vladimir Putin warned earlier this month that Western approval for Ukraine to strike deep inside Russia would mean Moscow was at war with NATO, Russian propagandists rushed to rattle the nuclear saber.
Alexander Mikhailov, director of the Bureau of Military Political Analysis, called for bombing plywood mock-ups of London and Washington — complete with reproductions of Buckingham Palace, Big Ben and the White House — to simulate nuclear strikes, so that they would “burn so beautifully that it will horrify the world.”…
But inside the Kremlin, there is a growing recognition that the repeated use of the nuclear threat is starting to lose its potency and Moscow’s red lines are…
