Abstrakt
Available scholarship suggests that successful nuclear coercion against resolved adversaries is difficult and, hence, rare. However, Russia appears to have attempted it: When annexing four Ukrainian provinces in autumn 2022, Moscow employed nuclear rhetoric to either force Kyiv into submission or, at a minimum, to limit the Ukrainian forces' freedom of action.
Why did the Russian government think it could succeed? Absent access to governmental decision-making documents, our efforts focus on exploiting the existent literature on nuclear coercion, on leveraging our close monitoring of Russia's nuclear rhetoric to conduct congruence analysis, and on extrapolating from various literatures towards theory building. First, we discuss why researchers conclude nuclear coercion is hard.
Second, we offer a careful reconstruction of Russia's behaviour. Finally, we propose three potentially complementary pathways that arguably contributed to Moscow's choice to attempt nuclear coercion: overestimating the utility of nuclear weapons; misjudgement of Western stakes; and misunderstanding of global implications.