Putin was asked during the Q&A session that followed his speech at the Valdai Club’s conference in early October to comment on his Foreign Ministry’s statement that Russia will resort to nukes if Kaliningrad is attacked. He explained that “we would be facing an adversary with twice our population. It has immense economic and military potential. Yes, we would not have a vast array of forces and means at our disposal to counter such a threat. We would have to rely on our competitive advantages in this struggle.”
As for what those competitive advantages are, Putin reminded everyone that “no one else possesses the kinds of strike capabilities that Russia has today”, adding that “We are not threatening anyone. We are simply stating that we do not have all that many means of defending ourselves.” His explanation might shock many “Non-Russian Pro-Russians”, who believe that Russia would steamroll through European NATO just like some of their opponents have hysterically been fearmongering about.
For starters, the EU has roughly three times as many people as Russia does, not only twice as many. Second, Trump 2.0’s National Defense Strategy declared that “European NATO dwarfs Russia in economic scale, population, and, thus, latent military power”, it just has to be properly organized. And finally, the NATO 3.0 concept that Trump 2.0 is actively implementing will see the US supervise European NATO’s containment of Russia, which will include optimizing the aforesaid interplay of factors to this end.
The western flank of the new “cordon sanitaire” that Trump 2.0 has assembled around Russia is the most advanced since it links NATO allies in the Arctic-Baltic, Central European, and Black Sea regions. The first two geographic regions include the Swedish-led Viking Bloc, Germany, and Poland, all three of which are capable of attacking Kaliningrad either on their own or jointly. As a reminder, Germany’s first foreign military base since World War II opened up last spring in Lithuania, which borders Kaliningrad.
This Russian exclave is only slightly larger than Connecticut and has just a little more than one million people, thus making it relatively easy to overrun through coordinated aerial, sea, and ground attacks, ergo the necessity of declaring that Russia would resort to nukes in self-defense for deterrence purposes. Moreover, Kaliningrad hosts the headquarters of Russia’s Baltic Fleet and is also thought to host some of its nukes, so Russia’s national security would be greatly harmed through its destruction or capture.
These facts – Kaliningrad’s exclave status, hosting a regional military HQ, and possibly hosting some nukes too – contextualize why Russia would resort to nukes if the region comes under serious aggression, and declared as much for deterrence purposes, but didn’t do the same for Kursk. It was only attacked by Ukraine, whose forces couldn’t destroy or capture it, and its location in “mainland Russia” made it easier to launch a counteroffensive. It also didn’t host any regional military HQ or nukes.
Having clarified the differences between these two, which account for why Russia declared that it would use nukes to defend Kaliningrad but didn’t use them to defend Kursk, the question therefore arises of whether this will suffice for deterring European NATO. Despite their leaders’ tough talk for domestic political purposes, they’re still human beings with self-preservation instincts, so they might choose not to commit suicide by authorizing any serious aggression against Kaliningrad knowing what would follow.
