After months of increasingly public pleas from Ukraine, the US government has finally given Volodymyr Zelensky the green light to strike territory inside the Russian Federation with American-provided ATACMS missiles. The Ukrainian military, under increasing pressure as Moscow’s forces make advances in eastern Ukraine and with an eye on an unpredictable relationship with the US president-elect, Donald Trump, is hoping that the decision proves transformative. The long-range, high-tech ATACMS is no wonder weapon – and missiles will be in short supply – but it is a powerful system that could help Kyiv’s forces batter enemy troops, bases and supply lines deep in Russian territory. The UK has followed America’s lead and granted permission to use another long-range missile, the Storm Shadow, to hit Russia. Ukraine’s army has received two powerful boosts to its ailing war effort in a single week.
The Kremlin’s response to news of Biden’s decision has been one of unbridled fury. Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman, declared that the US was adding “fuel to the fire and to further provoke the level of tension”. Peskov reminded reporters of comments made by Vladimir Putin in September, when the Russian president declared that allowing the use of ATACMS to strike Russia would mean “Nato countries are directly involved in [the] military conflict” with Moscow. That, Putin had claimed, would require “appropriate decisions” to be made. What that involved was left deliberately vague, but lower-level lawmakers and analysts – as is typical in the Russian political and propaganda apparatus – have run wild with the theme. “Russia said: ‘Just try it and you’ll get something in response,’” as one military analyst told the leading Argumenty i Fakty newspaper. Maria Butina, convicted as a foreign agent in the US before taking up a second career in politics in Russia, said that Biden was “seriously risking the start of World War III”. War with Ukraine, war with Nato, or even a world war: ever thicker layers of hyperbole promise imminent catastrophe.
On 19 November, two days after Biden granted permission to use ATACMS, Ukraine hit a facility in Russia’s Bryansk region. “American rockets attack Russia!” screamed Moscow’s media outlets, depicting a conflict not between Moscow and Kyiv but between Moscow and Washington. For decades, Putin’s regime has told its people that America – or the synonymous terms Nato and the “collective West” – is waging a war against Russia and Russians, determined to eradicate them using any means necessary. Now it would seem that physical attacks are being added to the cultural and spiritual offensives that the regime purports Washington is already levelling at Russians.
The regime has ramped up this narrative even further by announcing that Vladimir Putin signed a new nuclear doctrine on the same day that Ukraine struck Bryansk. The new doctrine, which has been months in the making, substantially lowers the threshold for Moscow’s use of nuclear strikes. According to this revised policy, any attack and even “aggression” by a non-nuclear power supported by a nuclear-armed state meets the threshold for action. Dmitry Medvedev, currently deputy chairman of the country’s security council, took to X to declare that as temperatures rise, “Russia could retaliate with WMD against Kiev [sic] and key Nato facilities, wherever they’re located. That means World War III.” In this version of reality, Joe Biden may have sparked a mass global conflict.
Moscow’s strident declarations are understandably worrying. Serious analysts express concern that Russia may escalate and the world, as it has done so many times in the era of mass warfare, may sleepwalk its way into an engulfing conflict – a fear that is stoked by the social media antics of many on the far right and left. Donald Trump Jr, for example, claimed that the “Military industrial complex seems to want to make sure they get World War III going before my father has a chance to create peace and save lives”.
The worry is understandable. Not since American, British and French arms and armies were deployed against the Bolshevik government in the Russian Civil War a century ago – and 30 years before Moscow went nuclear – have Western nations come so close to physical contact on Russian territory. Putin is an unpredictable and megalomaniacal figure who should be taken seriously. When he and his allies declare their intentions to escalate, Western leaders and publics should have cause for concern. Yet, in reality, the latest bout of splenetic rage emanating from the propaganda apparatus is not aimed at us – it is aimed at the domestic Russian audience.
In reality, the arrival of ATACMS strikes on regions like Bryansk has not changed much. Ukraine has been attacking Russia directly since 2022. Just a week before the ATACMS decision was made, Kyiv sent 34 drones to strike Moscow, injuring at least five people and causing flight diversions around major airports in the capital region. Despite attempts to dislodge them, Ukrainian forces – armed with plenty of Western military technology – have been holding a chunk of Russia’s Kursk region since August. News of the detonation of fuel silos, ammunitions dumps, and other strategic locations in Russia has become so normalised that it does not even warrant a response from the Kremlin – which itself was attacked with a drone in 2023. Indeed, Ukraine has even already used ATACMS to strike territory that Moscow claims as Russian. In June, multiple fatalities and 150 casualties resulted from an attack on Sevastopol in Crimea.
In response to the June attack, the Russian foreign ministry trotted out the same lines we have heard in recent days, claiming that the US had “effectively become a party to” Ukraine’s war with Russia. Meanwhile, friendly propagandists in mainstream and social media made the same feverish declarations that the strike could lead to apocalyptic escalation.
Even further back, when Kyiv first received ATACMS, Putinist TV host Vladimir Solovyov promised that Ukraine would “cease to exist” as a result. In Moscow’s eyes, the territories it has already seized in Ukraine – Crimea and the four annexed regions in the east – are legally a part of the Russian Federation. They have already been attacked by Ukraine using the very technology that today will purportedly lead to World War III. Each attack sparked the same rhetoric from Moscow. Yet no nuclear response has been forthcoming (nor was it forthcoming in the wake of the state’s many past claims that war with Nato had already begun). This time, rhetoric around the ATACMS decision has captured the Western public’s attention, but it is hardly new.
Why make these same claims time and again when the Kremlin has no intention of following through on them? The escalatory rhetoric plays extremely well with the vocal nationalist crowd on digital platforms like Telegram, a popular source for consumption of news in Russia. On state-run Telegram channels, reports of the Kremlin’s braggadocio often cause excitable pile-ons in comment threads. “It’s time to stop taking pity on Poo-kraine. We have to respond and make them fear even thinking about touching us,” went one top-rated comment in a popular channel. Another user was certain of Russia’s power to respond: “Hope to God they don’t attack the RF [Russian Federation] or our response will be a whole lot crueller. How many times did they hit Belgorod and got it back 10-20 times stronger, wasn’t that a f**king lesson enough?” Ordinary Russians can see what they believe to be their peers getting behind their government, engaging in tough talk, and imagining a strong national response – despite the many crises the Russian Federation is facing.
Repeatedly promising cataclysmic responses to incremental steps forward in military support for Ukraine is not about creating sound military policy or about revealing Russia’s military intentions, which are created independently of Western decision-making. It is part of a ploy to charge up an excitable nationalist base in Russia, encouraging its members to bond with each other in online and offline communities around the certainty that Moscow’s war against Ukraine is meaningful and that the broader metaphysical war with the West – the great moment when Russia will finally emerge from its post-Soviet cultural and geopolitical torpor to become a superpower once more – is winnable. The more the state’s rhetoric reaches for hyperbole, the more it goads Western commentators into doing the same, and the more its keenest domestic supporters are reassured that all will be right in the world.
Indeed, look beyond the hyperbole aimed at nationalists, and the state has been playing a careful game to avoid widespread domestic panic for months. Its propaganda channels have variously claimed or reminded more nervous Russians that the US does not have enough ATACMS to cause any real damage to Russia, that missiles cannot reach Moscow’s forces anyway, and that, regardless, the ATACMS attack on Crimea changed nothing. A range of stories, from the inflammatory to the placatory, give Russians an equivalent range of realities and opportunities to realign their engagement with the state’s stories of war.
Russia’s threats of escalation should always be taken seriously. Yet today, the only country that will face the real effects of escalation in the near future will be Ukraine, whose population and energy infrastructure will come in for yet more bombardment as Putin seeks to gain the upper hand in the imminent future. The Russian president, however, is looking to a future where the greater part of Ukraine is under his control – not to a world wrapped in the ashes of a nuclear winter. World War III is not on the horizon, but the Putin regime will keep promising it.
[See also: The combat zone]
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