Russia just threatened the UK with nuclear weapons. Here’s what’s really happening

Moscow has started making nuclear threats again, this time in menacing Tuesday morning social media posts from the Russian embassy in London. “Any British or Nato military action against Russian territory would be met with a response using all means at Russia’s disposal, including nuclear weapons,” the embassy wrote on Telegram and X. That might startle anybody that finds the idea of the UK or Nato attacking Russia in the first place a little far-fetched. But the threat referred directly to two items in British media from the last week – a report by The i Paper on Russia’s Kaliningrad exclave, and Sky TV’s The Wargame series. Both of them considered circumstances where Russia might find its own territory under threat after provoking a conflict. A post by the Russian embassy in London on Tuesday morning that referenced a recent report in The i Paper and the Sky News series ‘The Wargame’ Kaliningrad is a slice of formerly German land on the Baltic Sea that the USSR claimed for itself after the Second World War. The collapse of the Soviet Union left the region stranded between two independent countries, Poland and Lithuania. For decades, that meant it was seen as a threat, and a Russian outpost that could directly threaten Europe from beyond the borders of “mainland“ Russia. Elaborate scenarios regarding closing the “Suwałki gap” and cutting off the Baltic states from the rest of Nato depended on Russia having powerful military forces in Kaliningrad, as well as in Belarus on the other side of the “gap”. Now, however, the drawdown of military power there to feed Russia’s war on Ukraine has left Kaliningrad a vulnerable weak point, and its European neighbours are seeing it not as a military threat, but as a source of instability. In that respect, the frontline states face the same problem as they did in the 1990s: Russia as a challenge paradoxically because it is weak at the same time as issuing these bombastic threats. The hypersensitive Russian reaction to The i Paper’s reporting on Kaliningrad confirms Russian weakness – not strength. But the context of Moscow’s threats doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. The embassy is threatening nuclear use in the case of any attack by the UK or Nato on Russian territory. But the only conceivable circumstance under which that could happen is in a major conflict that Russia has already launched. Sky’s The Wargame, in which I played on the show’s Kremlin team, simulated Russian attacks on the UK, where the British response included airstrikes on Kaliningrad and the Kola Peninsula in the Arctic, home of Russia’s Northern Fleet. The scenario designers for the series had decided before filming started that the culmination had to involve Russian nuclear weapons. Because that was so wildly implausible, I and the other team members playing Russia had to work hard to find a way it would be even marginally credible. A British attack on the defences of the Northern Fleet, a key part of Russia’s nuclear deterrent, was built in to start the nuclear conversation. In reality, though, a British cabinet would be advised of the implications of their actions rather than being hoodwinked into launching an attack that triggered a nuclear threat. The embassy’s posts are not the only sign that The Wargame has drawn attention in Moscow. Both main state TV channels devoted lengthy segments on their hours-long Sunday evening propaganda-fests to the series, using clips from it to ridicule the idea that Russia posed any threat to the West. But at the same time as calling it a “serious attack of Russophobia”, they couldn’t resist ramming home the message of British vulnerability to Russia. One anchor took issue with the suggestion in The Wargame that one of Russia’s Oreshnik missiles would take 22 minutes to reach the UK from Murmansk. It’s only 16 minutes, they pointed out – or just eight minutes if launched from western Russia. Shorts Denying hostile intent while issuing dire threats of annihilation is a classic motif of Russian propaganda and disinformation. “Russia has repeatedly made clear that it neither seeks confrontation with Nato and Europe nor intends to attack them,” its London embassy says in its Telegram post. That’s a line we’ve also heard directly from Vladimir Putin. But there aren’t many people taking that kind of assurance seriously, after we heard exactly the same promises about Ukraine right up to the moment Russia launched its full-scale invasion there in 2022. That invasion was accompanied by nuclear threats that proved devastatingly effective in constraining the United States from confronting Russia. In 2023, together with a team of British colleagues, I travelled to Washington to meet US government officials and try to understand why this was so. Disturbingly, we found that the information campaign that Russia had deployed over the previous decade had convinced American officials that it would be more dangerous to allow Russia to be defeated than it would to allow Ukraine to be destroyed – which was the assessment driving so many of the otherwise inexplicable decisions on delaying and limiting some aspects of crucial support to Ukraine. More recently, the hyperbolic nuclear threats – Russia’s “nuclear willy-waving” as some senior British military officers have called it – have subsided. That’s because Russia no longer needs to invest such great effort in distorting US policy. As I describe in painful detail in my book American Overthrow released this month, the current Trump administration has its own reasons for pandering to Russia whenever possible, without any need for nuclear blackmail. But Moscow’s latest foray into threatening global destruction shows Russia still thinks this is a useful card to play. That doesn’t alter the fact that Russia’s best option would be not to start any more wars in the first place.