Speaking yesterday at a foreign policy conference outside Moscow, Vladimir Putin provided more evidence of his intent to go nuclear in Ukraine, in part by denying he intends to go nuclear.
"We have no need to do this," he said. "There’s no sense for us, neither political nor military," he added, which only reminded Putinologists everywhere of his early 2022 denials of his intention to invade Ukraine.
The most proximate key to his nuclear lie was his subjacent lie. Putin repeated Russian propagandists' increasingly circulated falsehood that Ukraine, in a treacherous false-flag operation, is about to detonate a "dirty bomb" somewhere on its own territory.
This would then obligate Moscow to respond in kind or with a tactical nuclear strike. Either way, thousands of Ukrainians would die of radioactive poisoning.
But it was what underlies Putin's firm insistence that there is "no need" for Russia to go nuclear that most alarmed Western analysts. "This is a trick, it shouldn’t make anyone relax," said Tatiana Stanovaya, a Russian political analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Putin plans to prove a need," which goes back to his paranoia about the West and its support of Ukraine.
"His goal is to show that escalation is the product of Western policies," said Stanovaya.
She elaborated: "There’s now a sense that he is building an anti-Western coalition on a global scale." Whether he is may be an open question, although as The NY Times reports, yesterday China "offered a full-throated endorsement of Mr. Putin's leadership."
Whatever the actual case, Putin believes he is on an anti-Western upswing. Said Stanovaya: "He doesn’t think he’s been backed into a corner. He thinks he’s a witness to the birth of a new world."

Grotesque but all too real is that one of his partners in this new world order could well be the United States — and that partnership could begin as early as January. Under a Republican House, the presumed leadership has already asserted that President Biden shall have no "blank check" from Congress in his military and humanitarian support of Ukraine.
Putin is playing to this incoming caucus and the base that elects it. "In the United States," he said in his foreign policy address, "there’s a very strong part of the public who maintain traditional values, and they’re with us. We know about this."
Putin went on to analyze — correctly, one should note — American politics in particular. "There are at least two Wests," he ventured. One is a West of "traditional, mainly Christian values," which align with Russia's sentiments. But "there’s another West — aggressive, cosmopolitan, neocolonial, acting as the weapon of the neoliberal elite" — an elite that wants to shove its "pretty strange" ethics on all others, including "dozens of genders" and "gay parades."
Putin's words could have been delivered by most any Republican candidate on the stump.
Should the authoritarian Republican Party take control of Congress and the White House in 2025 — through recessionary politics or outright stolen elections — American sentiment, which by 73% supports continuing aid to Ukraine, would make no difference. Authoritarians do what authoritarians wish to do. That's the whole point of authoritarianism.
Cutting aid to Ukraine would be "perfect." As was, for instance, Putin's autocratic decision to invade Ukraine. If Russia had waited, he said yesterday, "the worse it would have been for us, the more difficult and more dangerous."
The one known, inescapable and most disconcerting fact of the Russia-Ukraine war is that Vladimir Putin cannot lose it. He must triumph to be credible, to hold power. It's everything to him. It is his and Russia's honor, duty, destiny. Without victory in Ukraine, Putin is nothing. He'll soldier ahead until a million of them are dead or he is.
Thus he'll use any means necessary to avoid defeat — knowing, in medias res, that the West will never respond proportionately. And all the while he'll be working to split the West from its own best interests, with a huge assist, quite possibly, from the United States.