Russia Is Ramping Up Nuclear War Propaganda

For months, pro-Kremlin media has struck a bellicose tone, proposing that President Vladimir Putin take the extraordinary step of launching a nuclear strike against Ukraine. Across Russian state TV and social media sites, pundits and presenters warned that Europe could be reduced to ashes should it continue its support for Ukraine. Last week, Moscow leaned into that rhetoric, conducting nuclear weapons drills while accusing Kyiv of planning a false-flag attack, perhaps with a nuclear-laced “dirty bomb.

” “Our information on Ukraine’s potential provocations involving the use of a nuclear bomb is sufficiently reliable,” Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov told a press conference on October 24. Defense minister Sergei Shoigu had conveyed this supposedly reliable information to the leaders of the United States, United Kingdom, France, and Turkey, according to read-outs from the Russian government. That extraordinary accusation, which lines up with bombast that has permeated both state-sanctioned television news and the more independent-minded broadcasters on messaging app Telegram, has caused concern that a nuclear attack against Ukraine is imminent.

Even as the Kremlin has tried to assuage those fears in recent days, fears of a possible nuclear attack remain high. If Russia does use a nuclear weapon in Ukraine, it would be the first nation state to do so since the United States bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. It would also be alms to the increasingly aggressive pundits and influencers who have worked overtime to keep up support for the war at home.

But this kind of apocalyptic language from Russian state TV isn’t new. Neither are baseless allegations that Ukraine is preparing a dirty bomb. In fact, experts say, the language coming from Russia’s propaganda organs hasn’t changed much at all.

This nuclear propaganda is meant to “scare the West and appease the audience—and take their mind away from failures,” says Kateryna Stepanenko, a Russia analyst at the US think tank Institute for the Study of War and a frequent watcher of Russian TV. “For Russian television, it’s pretty standard to use nuclear threats,” says Stepanenko. “It’s very common for Russian media to remind their domestic audience that they have nuclear weapons and that they are still a powerful state.

” Rhetoric around a “dirty bomb” first popped up on pro-Russian Telegram channels before the war even began. One popular account with nearly 100,000 followers uploaded a video in early February claiming to show a far-right Ukrainian organization constructing such a bomb: Hands clad in black gloves adjusted a radiological meter atop a barrel, supposedly, of nuclear material. The account warned that such a bomb would be “used against Russian troops in the event of an invasion.

” The video, however, was quickly debunked—the Ukrainian-language video is rife with spelling mistakes and shows common industrial equipment, according to the Ukrainian fact-check organization StopFake. Nevertheless, the basic claim remained a constant reference for those pro-Kremlin Telegram accounts—appearing in hundreds of posts over the last eight months, being viewed hundreds of thousands of times. Days before Russia steamrolled across the border in February, comments made by Ukrainian president Volodmyr Zelensky helped to revive the allegations.

Zelensky called out the other signatories to the 1994 Budapest Memorandum—Belarus, Kazakhstan, Russia, the United States, and the United Kingdom—which had agreed that the three former Soviet states would give up their nuclear weapons to Russia in exchange for assurances of their sovereignty. Without a meeting to resolve the issues between Russia and Ukraine, Zelensky said, Ukraine “will have every right to believe that the Budapest Memorandum is not working and all the package decisions of 1994 are in doubt. ” Pro-Russian Telegram channels lit up, casting Zelensky’s statements as a declaration of nuclear war.

“Zelensky just went crazy,” wrote Alexander Kots,a pro-Kremlin reporter who is considered close to the Russian war effort and has frequently been embedded with the Russian army, on Telegram in February. “A healthy person … would not jokingly, let alone seriously, threaten the world with a nuclear bomb,” Kots said, parroting the talking point that Zelensky was an avid drug user. “They [Ukraine] still have Chernobyl,” Kots continued, and referenced “the nationalists’ wet dreams of a ‘dirty bomb.

’” Those threats of a dirty bomb, one Telegram page associated with the Russian-baked Donbas separatists claimed, created “an ideological and political platform for launching a military operation. ” That rhetoric made it to Russian state TV. One lawmaker, Andrei Kartapolov, told audiences that the invasion was necessary so that Russian forces could seize Ukrainian nuclear plants and prevent Zelensky “ from building a dirty bomb .

” When Putin’s war started, the nuclear specter continued to be a convenient theme for domestic audiences. RIA Novosti, a state-run wire service, quoted an anonymous government official in early March who claimed Ukraine “[used] the Chernobyl nuclear power plant zone as a site for the development of nuclear weapons. ” The claims became more elaborate: Pro-Kremlin accounts began suggesting that Kyiv wouldn’t just detonate a dirty bomb, but that it had the missile systems capable of launching them well into Russian territory.

This invented threat quickly became an excuse to invoke the threat of nuclear war. On state-owned Channel One, a host stood before graphics of Russia’s underwater nuclear drone and promised that Europe would be a ” radioactive desert ” if Moscow decided to strike—a decision that could be made, he added days later, if the country feels appropriately threatened. This rhetoric stayed largely constant as the war dragged on.

Intense fighting around the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, Europe’s largest, raised concerns that an errant artillery shell could leak radiation into the surrounding area. After Russian forces captured the power plant, Moscow accused Ukraine of risking a nuclear meltdown by continuing to fight. Russian TV, meanwhile, turned Zaporizhzhia into a red line, threatening that if the plant “is damaged and a disaster happens, two missiles will instantly land in your decision-making centers,” commentator Yuri Kot said: “ One in Washington and the other in London .

” Through the summer and into fall, some Russian state TV pundits talked about nuclear war as an eventuality—it will be ” days or a week ” until nuclear war, one said. Stepanenko says Moscow has waged a very similar propaganda campaign around Ukraine’s supposed “biolabs. ” Since the war began, the Kremlin has accused Ukraine of running US-funded bioweapons facilities , suggesting that Kyiv was set to release a deadly virus into the Russian population.

Russia has repeatedly brought these claims to the United Nations. The spikes in these narratives spread across the last eight months come after Ukrainian successes, Stepanenko says. Reminding audiences of Russia’s might is especially critical right now, she says, given the number of soldiers—including those conscripted under Putin’s recent “partial mobilization”—who are “coming back in caskets.

” Whilst TV hosts are given talking points from Putin’s government, they have considerable latitude to put their own dramatic spin on things. Scaring the West has been a particular objective since the start of the war—but it has proved relatively ineffective to date. Western governments have, largely, stayed unified in their decision to impose unprecedented sanctions on Russia and have kept up substantial weapons transfers.

But divergent voices are getting louder. Silvio Berlusconi, Italy’s former prime minister who is now a junior partner in Italy’s new right-wing government, is considered friendly to Putin. Germany’s center-left government has waivered on its commitment to the cause.

But it’s in the US where the loudest skepticism for arming and supporting Ukraine has emerged—both the Democrats’ progressive caucus and the right flank of the Republican Party have criticized President Joe Biden’s support of Kyiv, often citing the threat of nuclear war. Russian media has had a favorite stateside counterpart: Tucker Carlson. When Moscow was inflating the biolabs conspiracy theory, Carlson gleefully ran with the story on multiple episodes of his show.

His message aligned with the Kremlin narrative so closely that Russian state media was instructed to rebroadcast clips from Carlson’s show. On Thursday a series of nuclear missile tests, as one host on US news content provider Channel One phrased it, ” practiced destroying the USA … and the formerly Great Britain ,” sent a clear message that Russia was willing to destroy the West, the pundits said. But it was the “absolutely wonderful Tucker Carlson who was the first to read our signal, even before we launched it,” host Olga Skabeeva said.

Intimidating Ukraine, Stepanenko says, is an increasingly useless proposition. “I feel like this rhetoric is no longer scary to Ukrainians,” she says. Many of the pro-Kremlin Telegram channels, like Kots’, are run by war correspondents or are closely linked to units fighting in Ukraine.

The Institute for the Study of War has taken to calling them “milbloggers. ” Those accounts tend to identify with ultra-nationalist factions in Moscow, particularly with Wagner Group founder Yevgeny Prigozhin. Stepanenko and her colleagues have noted that these milbloggers have relentlessly attacked Shoigu while suggesting Prigozhin as a replacement.

While the Putin regime does not tend to tolerate dissent, the Kremlin tends to pay particular heed to criticisms from these milbloggers. “Milbloggers do have a significant influence,” she says. She added, “I definitely see some narratives where [the Ministry of Defense] tried to mimic the milbloggers.

” Shoigu’s invocation of biolabs and dirty bombs seems to be evidence of that. More recently, some of these milbloggers have started appearing on state TV. An edition of The Big Game , Channel One’s flagship news show, opened last week by interviewing Semen Pegov—also known as WarGonzo—from outside his hospital.

Pegov, whose Telegram channel boasts 1. 3 million subscribers, was wounded this month after stepping on a mine. He told the presenters that he was keen to get back to the front lines to “tell the heroic stories of the guys who are fighting.

” Stepanenko says, increasingly, those stories are bad news for Moscow. “They go on state television from the front line and say the front line is falling,” she says. In some cases, it seems tactical strategy was drawn up in response to the milblogger’s criticism: Changes in command within the Russian ranks seemed to come after intense scrutiny on Telegram, for example.

Stepanenko points to a consensus on Telegram that Russia ought to target Ukrainian energy infrastructure. In recent weeks, she says, “Putin delivered on that. ” “Every time they criticize someone particularly prominent, we see a reaction from the Russian government or, at least, the [Ministry of Defense].

” What’s interesting, she says, is that Moscow’s efforts to placate these milbloggers appears to be getting less effective. Shoigu’s warnings of a dirty bomb garnered just a few days of muted enthusiasm on Telegram, before the conversation moved on. Frustration with the chaotic mobilization and with continued equipment and leadership problems on the front lines is mounting.

“What we’re seeing is the Russian [Ministry of Defense] consistently failing to capture the narrative, at least online,” Stepanenko says. Shoigu “is just not convincing them. ”.