Would Russia use nuclear weapons to defeat Ukraine?
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Kramatorsk, Ukraine (CNN) --
The chaos of the past week might be wrongly comforting.
Although Russia continues to disastrously conduct its war of choice in Ukraine, the most dangerous moment in the conflict may be near.
Sometime this week, the Kremlin is likely to declare that "fake" referendums in four partially occupied parts of Ukraine have given a mandate for their rapid assimilation into what Moscow calls Russian territory.
Referendums are illegal under international law, and Ukraine, the United States and the rest of NATO have already made it clear that this measure will have no legal validity and will lead to sanctions.
Breaking news and news from Russia's war in Ukraine on September 27
But it will happen anyway, and Russia is likely to seize the moment to amplify the central threat behind this charade, openly declared by Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov over the weekend: that Moscow reserves the right to "fully protect" the areas that have formally become their territory.
Moscow's threat is clearly nuclear.
Putin has cast his bellicose rhetoric — warning last week that Russia would "make use of all available weapons systems" if necessary — as a response to non-existent nuclear threats from NATO.
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But his officials have been surprisingly clear: They want the use of nuclear weapons to be seen as a real possibility and, as Putin put it, "not a bluff."
This has caused a chilling shift in messaging from Washington.
For months, Western officials dismissed any suggestion that nuclear conflict was even a consideration.
Now, US President Joe Biden and his cabinet officials are forced to publicly send messages of deterrence and preparedness to reassure their allies, and just about everyone on planet Earth.
Russian men flee the country to avoid going to war 1:31
It's really uncomfortable to live in a time when the US government feels they have to publicly warn a Russia at war - which is losing heavily and unexpectedly against a neighbor they always thought they could bend at will - that the use of nuclear weapons is a bad idea.
The principles of mutually assured destruction that brought a dark calm to the Cold War seem to have expired.
We are facing a Russia that wants to project an image of a madman willing to lose everything — for everyone — if he faces losing in this war.
Putin is now much weaker
This is a binary moment for Putin, who does not have any kind of escalation or smooth exit ramp.
The partial mobilization of Russian civilians has been as disastrous as anyone who has watched Russian conscription for decades would have expected: The "wrong" people enlisted, as the rich fled and the poor outnumbered everyone else.
Rusty rifles, buses full of drunken recruits, and still no answer to the key question of how these tens of thousands of untrained and perhaps unwilling soldiers will be supplied and equipped at the front if Moscow failed to adequately equip its regular army in the last six months.
And the crisis in Putin's Russia has not had to wait for the newly mobilized to return in coffins.
The chaos of the mobilization already has Kremlin propaganda tycoons like Margarita Simonian, the head of the state-controlled network RT, acting like a dying aunt on Twitter to Russians whose fathers, sons or husbands have been sent incorrectly in front.
They argue that overzealous local officials are to blame for recruitment mistakes, but ultimately, it is the war, and its gruesome prosecution, that has brought Russia this far.
The Moscow elite's acknowledgment of the catastrophe of the mobilization smacks a bit of criticism of the boss himself, and that is rare.
Ukraine reports that there are signs of torture and mutilations on the bodies exhumed from Izium
All this leaves Putin much weaker than when he had just lost the war.
To add insult to injury, he now faces perhaps unprecedented internal dissent.
His position depends on strength, and now he lacks it, almost completely.
The forcible mobilization of unwilling aged and young men is unlikely to change the calculus of the battlefield, where Ukrainian morale is through the roof and their equipment is slowly improving.
Don't look for change in Putin's inner circle.
They are all covered in the same blood from this war, and from behind the slow pace of repression that has turned Russia into a dystopian autocracy for the last 22 years.
Putin has no obvious successor;
do not expect whoever finally replaces you to back down and ask for peace and economic recovery.
Any successor may try to prove his mettle with an exercise even more reckless than the original invasion of Ukraine.
And now that?
So we are left with a loser Putin, who cannot afford to lose.
Without much conventional force, he could turn to other tools to reverse this disastrous position.
Strategic aviation could bomb parts of Ukraine, although many of its towns and cities seem to have already done so.
It could also resort to chemical or biological weapons, although these would be too close to its own border for sanity or comfort, and would provoke an intense international response.
Zelensky sees a possible nuclear attack from Russia latent 0:53
And then there's the nuclear option, something that was previously so unthinkable that it seems crazy to commit to printing it.
But that also carries risks for Putin, beyond likely military retaliation from NATO.
An army that can't fly enough planes or fuel enough tanks is in trouble.
You might worry that you won't be able to carry out an accurate, limited, and effective tactical nuclear strike.
Putin himself may worry that his weakened grip on power may not maintain a strong enough chain of command to actually obey the order to launch a nuclear weapon.
This could even be the moment when the best angels of Russian nature come to light.
In the five years I lived there, I met a bright, warm, sparkling town, most of it ravaged by centuries of misrule.
In the coming days, however, it will be tempting to dismiss Moscow's sweeping sovereignty claims and protests as the last gasps of an empire that forgot to look under the hood before driving into a storm.
This is a win-lose moment for Putin, and he doesn't see a future in which he loses.
war in ukraine
