Quo Vadis, Russian Deterrence? Strategic Culture and Coercion Innovations Free

When Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, it did so with a coherent framework of “strategic deterrence”—the Russian euphemism for nuclear and non-nuclear coercion (both deterrence and compellence) across all domains.¹ Though imperfect, it was the most detailed theory of nuclear, conventional, and informational coercion that Moscow had ever had. For the Russian defense establishment and expert community, the war offered a way to assess whether the pre-invasion and intra-war coercion schemes were effective. Wartime learning has already sparked Russia to adapt its deterrence strategy; further transformations are likely.

How does the Russian establishment analyze the failures and successes of Russia's intra-war coercion? How will Russia modify its deterrence strategy? Which factors will inform and shape these endeavors? Astute experts in this journal² and elsewhere³ are already probing these questions as well as this war's implications for international security theory and policy. These efforts are important. Yet most of the analyses from the West do not examine how Russia perceives its own deterrence balance or how Russian strategic culture affects coercion theory and strategy. They also seldom investigate what the Russian defense establishment has learned from this war.

Several factors have hindered Western scholarly efforts to uncover Russia's military innovation in the field of deterrence strategy. First, Western analyses insufficiently use primary Russian sources, which address the intangible aspects of military innovation, such as the ideational and cultural underpinnings of strategy. These factors, however, inform how Russia has been adapting its coercion theory and practice.

Second, scholarship tends to filter data through the optics of Western strategic theory. Rarely do Western scholars consider Russian strategic culture or the intellectual and military traditions that have shaped and continue to shape how Russia conceptualizes military strategy. Western scholars often presume that strategic theory is universal. Consequently, they hardly register what non-Western (in this case Russian) scholars of international security think and write. Western observers often lack a suitable framework for analyzing Russian strategic theory and its operational applications. Thus, with few exceptions, they have been slow to trace how the Russian theory of deterrence has evolved, including its conceptual apparatus and terminology.

Finally, on any topic pertaining to the war in Ukraine, some scholars find it difficult to separate emotion from cognition. Although the tendency to demonize the adversary is natural and has happened in the past, it is unhelpful.⁴ Doing so makes the strategic “Other” (i.e., Russia) seem even more alien, confusing, and contradictory. Scholars who do so risk missing how the Russian state generates strategic competitiveness and military power. Moreover, many Western scholars have stopped traveling to Russia, and their host institutions have terminated contacts with Russian academics, especially those associated with government-affiliated universities and think tanks. Track-two initiatives are infrequent, involve limited numbers of scholars, and are rarely accessible to the broader analytical community.

Left unaddressed, these shortcomings may downgrade the quality of the Western international security scholarship and hinder how the West performs in crises. It is at best unhelpful when scholars use the universal logic of deterrence and terminology from Western strategic studies to analyze Russian conduct. At worst, doing so could result in misdiagnoses and misperceptions, leading to security dilemmas and inadvertent escalations. If scholars investigate Russian conduct through Russian eyes, such endeavors can enrich the West's capacity to deal with foreign military innovations.

This article claims that strategic thinking evolves differently in various ideational realms. Deterrence is not a universal concept. It emerges in specific cultural contexts and thus varies across strategic communities. Cultural factors condition how a state approaches coercion strategy and account for differences across cases. To understand a given actor's coercion strategy, one must filter it through the lens of that actor's strategic culture. This is the main argument of this article.

This claim echoes the “tailored deterrence” literature, which calls for shifting from a one-size-fits-all to a context-specific approach to coercion.⁵ The current trend in scholarship is to offer a contextualized antipode to the previous generations of theory. This article follows an effort to bring the deterrence and strategic culture research programs closer together. My primary contribution is to offer cultural explanations for an actor's proclivities when executing a coercion strategy. This method has theoretical implications and practical applications beyond the Russian case. It may serve as a framework for examining how the militaries in China, Iran, North Korea, and elsewhere conceptualize coercion.

Scholarship accepts that ideational and cultural factors condition coercive theories of victory among different actors. Scholars refer to the Cold War dynamic between China, the United States, and the USSR to demonstrate that coercion has national characteristics.⁶ As of this writing, however, the nexus of deterrence and strategic culture has drawn little attention. During the last decade, only a few scholars have explored how a society's ideas and culture affect a state's coercion strategies, Russia's in particular. This article aims to fill this void.

The study of Russian military power is already a crowded analytical space. Most scholars and analysts focus on the so-called heavy metal—the tangible aspects of Russian power. Yet as the Russian saying goes, iron does not fight. Immaterial factors that shape how Russia makes policy choices, modernizes its weapons, and transforms its organizations remain relatively underexplored. Russia is not just a hodgepodge of military capabilities, manpower, and financial and natural resources. Rather, it is a unique strategic community that has been shaped by a different way of thinking about strategy (particularly about deterrence). The aim of this article is to highlight the otherness of the strategic other in the Russian case and to illustrate how scholars can apply this method elsewhere.

The following findings emerge from the analysis. The main lesson that the Russian defense establishment has learned is that its pre-2022 deterrence strategy and the posture supporting it are obsolete. Russia's main priority is to restore its coercive credibility, which the war has devalued. Another Russian aim is to refine nuclear coercion for conventional scenarios that do not produce existential threats but that threaten Russia's vital interests. Finally, Russia seeks to develop a coercion scheme for a non-nuclear near-peer competitor. This last challenge has forced the Russian expert community to overcome a major psychological obstacle with regard to coercing an actor (i.e., Ukraine) that the Kremlin believes does not have strategic agency. Russia has already taken the first steps in this direction.⁷

Three intangible novelties enable these trends more than the so-called heavy metal innovations. The first development is organizational-conceptual. Russian experts consider establishing a new organization that plans and executes deterrence operations and evaluates their effectiveness. In parallel, they seek to expand the rungs on the escalation ladder and develop a capacity to climb, descend, and skip over these rungs without losing coercive tension. Informational coercion and chemical weapons feature in Russian discourse as two likely candidates for these new rungs.

Second, the Russian military views the war in Ukraine as a testing range for the concept of strategic gestures—a term in the Russian military lexicon that refers to deploying and using nuclear and non-nuclear forces to deter and compel an adversary. Russia has already been making rhetorical and unrhetorical attempts to refine the art of strategic gestures. My analysis suggests that regardless of the situation on the battlefields of Ukraine, more strategic gestures are likely to occur in the future. The purpose of this aggressiveness is for Russia to bolster its deterrence, restore its coercive reputation, and refine the operational art of deterrence.⁸ Russian experts are examining whether artificial intelligence (AI), especially artificial generative intelligence (AGI), has the capacity to neutralize detrimental human emotions and cognitive biases and to improve decision-making and the credibility of coercion campaigns in the nuclear, conventional, sub-conventional, and informational realms.

Finally, this article argues that the unique ideational climate inside and outside the defense establishment is likely to shape Russian coercion policy. At the heart of this climate lies the Kremlin's inclination to engage in preemption and to prefer earlier nuclear use. Russia also flirts with the faith-driven madman strategy—maintaining a reputation of being staunchly religious and prepared to bet against the odds, which creates an image of being undeterrable that may enhance the credibility of one's threats.⁹ The erosion of the nuclear taboo within the Russian public also shapes this climate. All these factors are likely to influence nuclear operators’ morale-psychological and ideological states as well as the stability of command and control.

This article makes several contributions to both theory and policy. Building on primary and secondary sources about Russian military thought and the traits of Russian strategic culture, it hypothesizes about the next decade's trends in Russian deterrence theory and practice. It situates new empirical data within the preexisting knowledge about Russia and its strategic culture, accounting for the peculiarities of the Russian way of deterrence. It formulates a framework for subsequent research that will refute, refine, or support propositions about deterrence à la russe. The article is meant to be concrete enough to hypothesize about changes in Russian deterrence strategy. At the same time, it offers a way of thinking about the theory and strategy of coercion in the defense establishments that operate outside the Western intellectual tradition. I systematize the empirical evidence in such a way that scholars may use the Russian case as a building block for theory development.

I base my analysis on a combination of Russian sources with different political loyalties: military, doctrinal, and academic publications, field manuals, official seminars and conferences, think-tank reports, evidence from military exercises and the battlefield, social media, and interviews with experts.¹⁰ I also examine the professional and public discourses in Russia since the start of the war. The analysis critically commingles the accounts of active-duty officers, official and independent experts, and defense intellectuals affiliated with the government. Even though there are still major lacunae in our knowledge, the available sources make it possible to hypothesize about how Russian theory on coercion and the posture enabling it are likely to evolve. Despite secrecy and censorship, the Russian sources that I analyze in this article are more open and self-reflective than many in the West would presume.¹¹ I compare these materials with non-Russian sources to outline and probe the main trends, to identify the known unknowns, and to offer ways of thinking systematically about them.

The rest of this article proceeds as follows. The first section outlines the intellectual history of the Russian approach to coercion and highlights how it differs from that of the West. It also explores how Russia estimates its deterrence balance and the lessons that it draws from the war. Next, I highlight the main ways that Russia may adjust its strategic deterrence. The third section discusses the intellectual climate inside and outside the establishment. I present the implications for theory and policy in the conclusion.

Coercion is a form of geopolitical influence and one of the main tools of statecraft, along with diplomacy and war. The coercer threatens to use force (or uses force in a limited way) to prevent an opponent from engaging in unwanted behavior. To convince the adversary to do something (or not do something) against its will, the coercer signals that the costs of an adversary's prospective action outweigh the expected benefits. Deterrence is coercing an actor not to do something. Compellence is coercing an actor to do or stop doing something. Coercion is a prominent scholarly concept that falls under the rubric of deterrence theory in the international security literature. The principles of deterrence are somewhat general, but international actors may conceptualize and practice this strategy differently.¹²

The intellectual history of how Russia conceptualizes coercion illustrates a unique non-Western approach to this strategy. The singularities derive from Russian strategic culture, national mentality, and military and intelligence traditions. Below I briefly highlight the genealogy of deterrence à la russe. This is the conceptual climate within which the Russian expert community learns about and innovates the operational art of deterrence.

As both a scholarly theory and a national security practice, deterrence à la russe is about five decades younger than its Western counterpart.¹³ The concept has appeared incrementally in Russian military science; over time, “the Russian expert community has adopted certain terms from the Western lexicon and given them a Russian reading.”¹⁴ As Russia continues to theorize its approach to deterrence, it is deliberately taking a different path from that of the West.

Deterrence theory was anathema to the Soviet military during the Cold War. Yet since the Soviet Union's collapse, the concept has become highly significant to the Russian strategic community. During the 1990s and early 2000s, Russian experts pondered and probed the literature on deterrence, which had been accumulating in the West since the 1950s. They studied this corpus of knowledge, explored and debated it, and reworked some of it into their own version of deterrence.

The Russian art of deterrence encapsulates nuclear, non-nuclear, and informational (cyber) strategies in a unified, cross-domain program. In reference to it, Russian political leadership, senior military brass, and doctrinal publications use the term strategic deterrence. Its purpose is to use soft and hard power across various domains to deter and compel Russia's adversaries, through all phases of interaction.

The etymology of the English term deterrence implies inflicting fear. In contrast, the Russian term for deterrence, sderzhivanie, means to prevent something from occurring. Even when the Russian sources use the term intimidation, ustrashenie, the Russian approach to deterrence implies proactively shaping the adversary. Thus, Russian experts define this concept more broadly than do Western experts. Deterrence à la russe means to use threats, sometimes accompanied with limited force, to maintain the status quo (“to deter”), to change it (“to compel”), to shape the strategic environment, to prevent escalation, and to de-escalate. Russians use the term to describe signaling and coercive military activities that occur before the conflict and during the war itself. Consequently, Russian experts interpret deterrence much like Western experts conceptualize prewar and intra-war coercion.

In the nuclear and conventional realms, Russian experts tend to downplay the Western punishment versus denial typology (imposing costs versus preventing gains).¹⁵ Instead, they find it more useful to focus on the forceful versus nonforceful taxonomy. In practicing deterrence, the Russian strategic community strives to be flexible across domains. It also seeks to assess what actions may be psychologically damaging to its adversaries. Academic experts in the West “also appreciate these qualities, which lie at the heart of tailored deterrence.”¹⁶

Compared with the concepts of nuclear and conventional deterrence, informational coercion has been discussed in less detail in Russian writings. Russian experts recognize that it is impossible to replicate classical principles of deterrence in the informational realm. During the last decade, Russian strategic theory has tried to crystallize how Russia might use coercion in the informational sphere. In Russia's view, informational coercion demands constant use of limited force (psychological and technological). This is possible because damage in the informational domain is more tolerable than in the conventional and nuclear ones. Constant engagement of the adversary in the informational domain aims to produce deterring potential—a Russian notion similar to the Western “general deterrence.”¹⁷ Then, the initiator of the constant engagement leverages this potential of the general deterring image according to specific operational needs. As a result, in Russian informational operations, coercion and fighting are often indistinguishable.

There are several traits in Russian strategic culture that influence the way that the Russian expert community develops knowledge about deterrence. First, Russian analysts are inclined to think holistically-dialectically. In comparison to the Western approach, deterrence à la russe has broader meaning (it is a tool to preserve and change the status quo and to shape the battlefield), wider scope (it is a tool for wartime and peacetime), and it applies to more domains (military and nonmilitary). My analysis suggests that this thinking also accounts for Russia's tendency to merge kinetic and non-kinetic operations in a single coercion scheme. This holistic-dialectical inclination is emblematic of the Russian approach to strategy in general, beyond the deterrence realm.

Second, there is a mismatch between Russia's ability to develop a sophisticated theory and implement it. This dissonance may account for why Russian nuclear-conventional modernizations, posture, and doctrinal visions are at times incoherent. In comparison to the West, Russia's conceptual constructs are sometimes more sophisticated, but its military assets, force posture, industrial capabilities, and operational procedures are often insufficient to carry out these ideas. Moreover, different segments of the Russian strategic community often are not in sync on matters of deterrence. Traditional Russian social-managerial ills—recklessness, carelessness, staging events for show, and falsifying information—are partially accountable for this endemic mismatch.

Third, the Russian approach to strategy favors psychological-cognitive factors over material ones. Russian military or coercion campaigns aim primarily at perception of adversaries. In the Russian tradition of warfare, reflexive control, military cunningness, and active measures are the tools for this aim. Reflexive control—manipulating the picture of reality to manage adversarial strategic behavior—informs the general philosophy of the Russian analysts who develop deterrence theory. Military cunningness is deploying and using forces and information in a way that inclines the enemy to make a move that is damaging to itself. This stratagem, which encapsulates elements of bluff and deception, helps in signaling (when the coercer needs to communicate credible resolve and capability behind its threat, even if the threat is a bluff). Finally, a term from Russian intelligence is active measures, which refers to operations directed at adversarial states, organizations, groups, and individuals.¹⁸ Such measures aim to consciously (through persuasion and limited force) or unconsciously (through manipulation) elicit desirable behavior. The offensive character of the active measures and their core feature—using a mix of forceful and nonforceful measures to shape the adversary—correspond with the proactive logic of sderzhivanie. Deterrence à la russe does not exactly replicate these three constructs. But as Russian national security practitioners craft coercion strategy, these concepts inform their professional mentality and shape their conduct.

Several historical legacies also inform the building blocks for deterrence à la russe. First, the Russian quest for a balanced military capable of non-nuclear and nuclear deterrence traces back to Chief of the Soviet General Staff Nikolai Ogarkov. Second, the concept of “reasonable sufficiency”—a euphemism for scaling back investments to just what is necessary to achieve one's security goals—has informed the conduct of the Russian strategic community since the perestroika era. Finally, the Soviet evaluation method known as “correlation of forces and means” informs Russian experts when they diagnose adversaries’ fears and beliefs and identify “deterring damage”—imposing just enough cost to force the adversary to do something against its will.¹⁹

Since the beginning of the 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Russian defense establishment has been examining the combat evidence to refine Russia's strategic deterrence. The picture is incomplete, but there is enough data to outline Moscow's self-assessment and initial lessons that will inform how Russia subsequently transforms its coercion strategy. The starting point for these changes is the coercion balance, as Moscow sees it.

Before the war, Russia failed to compel the United States, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and Ukraine to accept its pre-invasion ultimatum in December 2021. The invasion constitutes a failure of coercion in some ways but not others. According to Western theoretical metrics, the resort to force underscores the futility of deterrence. But if judged by the Russian canon, the invasion is merely one step in a single, holistic deterrence campaign—a transition from nonforceful to forceful coercion. Russia failed to coerce Kyiv directly or through Washington, for the same reason that the United States’ attempt at “coercive disclosure” failed—the balance of interests favored the deterrence target. In the words of Ofek Riemer and Daniel Sobelman, coercive disclosure is “the purposeful disclosure of classified intelligence information and assessments as an instrument of foreign policy.”²⁰

When the war started, the Kremlin had three ultimate coercion goals: to deter the West from directly intervening, to paralyze NATO's indirect support, and to compel Ukraine to surrender. In Moscow's estimation, the effectiveness of its intra-war coercion has been mixed. The Kremlin believes that it has deterred NATO from directly intervening, and that it has partly succeeded in preventing it from become indirectly involved in the war. Russia has failed to create a hermetic cordon sanitaire around the theater of operations and to deter what it sees as a proxy war of the West. Nonetheless, Russia assumes that it has deterred NATO from crossing certain red lines by limiting the types, quantities, and tempo of arms transfers to Kyiv. Finally, Moscow accepts that its nuclear threats, conventional pressure, and escalatory rhetoric have failed to compel Kyiv to surrender.²¹ Russia has also botched triadic coercion—that is, it has failed to compel Washington to coerce Kyiv to accept a ceasefire on Russian terms. Moscow also realizes that it has failed in escalation dominance when deterring Ukraine from strikes on vital interests. Russia accepts that it has been unable to prevent Ukraine from striking symbolic and strategic targets deep in the Russian hinterland with advanced Western weapon systems, conducting an informational campaign against the Russian public to discredit the leadership and dissuade Russians from supporting the war, and conquering Russian territory.²²

How do Russian experts estimate the sources of these failures and successes? In the conventional realm, Moscow believes that it demonstrated its determination to escalate; coercion did not deliver because of the poor performance of the Russian military.²³ In the nuclear realm, in Moscow's view, the situation is the other way around—the West does not doubt Russian might, but it does question the Kremlin's resolve to opt for nuclear escalation.²⁴ The Russian expert community views some of these outcomes as neither predetermined nor irreversible. Russian sources do not believe that Russia's conventional deterrence would inevitably fail. Notwithstanding endemic deficiencies of Russian strategic culture (i.e., recklessness, carelessness, staging events for show, and falsifying information) and Ukraine's determination, experts suggest that if certain factors had been different—planning assumptions, the theory of victory, and the operational plan—then the outcome might have been different.²⁵

Russian experts believe that to restore Russia's credibility in the conventional realm, Russia must rebuild its capabilities to conduct large-scale, combined-arms operations and to demonstrate its capacity to launch multiple, frequent, and sustained long-range precision strikes.²⁶ Russian sources believe that these improvements are feasible but challenging, especially given Russia's traditional social-managerial deficiencies.

Russia is more concerned about improving its nuclear coercion on the conventional realm. The major frustration for the Kremlin is that its repeated nuclear bluffs (i.e., intimidations unsupported by actions), as well as the caution it has exhibited during escalation management, have devalued its coercion credibility. Thus, Russia believes that it must revise its nuclear coercion mechanism.²⁷ During the prewar decade, the Kremlin believed that Russia's strategic reputation enabled it to shape the calculus of the West and maintain or challenge the geopolitical status quo. Not anymore. The tone of Russian experts and officials betrays an anxiety that the West may perceive Moscow as weaker and less determined and seek to exploit this perceived weakness. Russians estimate that “fear,” which lies at the core of effective nuclear coercion, has evaporated in the West.²⁸

In sum, Russian insights from the war are grouped around three burning issues, which are likely to be at the heart of how Russia will transform its deterrence posture. First, the main lesson of the Russian defense community is that Russia's prewar deterrence strategy and the posture supporting it are obsolete. Russia must revise, modernize, and reconstitute its strategic deterrence. The main priority is to adjust Russia's deterrence posture to the new reality and restore its coercive credibility, which the war has devalued.

Second, the war has forced the Russian establishment to get used to the deterrence balance, whereby the non-nuclear adversary, which Moscow still perceives as conventionally inferior, also coerces Russia. This new reality elicits a cognitive dissonance among Russian experts, who had in mind a peer nuclear opponent as they developed Russian deterrence theory. Russia lacks the appropriate concepts for a non-nuclear near-peer competitor and has not engaged sufficiently with the possibility that coercive efforts against such an actor might fail.²⁹ Western experts of deterrence faced a similar challenge in the early 2000s, when states tried to deter non-state actors. Likewise, Moscow seeks to develop a new paradigm—coercion of conventional and asymmetrical competitors.³⁰

A final lesson from the war pertains to what I define as the culmination point of coercion—the point beyond which additional threats to use force, or its actual use, become self-defeating (i.e., they yield diminishing or negative returns and stimulate undesired adversarial behavior).³¹ Misdiagnosing the culmination point is a common pathology among strategists worldwide. Before the war, Russian practitioners and scholars paid meager attention to this topic.³² They are likely to double down on fixing this deficiency now.

The Kremlin wants its nuclear saber-rattling to be more effective against both nuclear and non-nuclear adversaries in conventional contingencies. Russian strategic culture, concepts developed before the conflict, and wartime lessons are shaping how Russia plans to refine its strategic deterrence.³³ Since 2023, “Russia's nuclear brass has urged the Kremlin to modernize each leg of the nuclear triad” and to enhance the survivability of command and control, early warning, and weapon systems.³⁴ These modernizations are unsurprising; they demonstrate a continuity with earlier trends.³⁵ Also, resorting to nuclear might to counterbalance its conventional weaknesses is akin to how Russia operated in the 1990s.³⁶ In addition to these continuities in Russia's modernization approach, there are novelties. One is organizational-procedural, another is doctrinal-conceptual, and a third relates to the strategic mindset. All of them pertain to intangible aspects of how Russian might reconstitute its deterrence.

Since the beginning of the war, the military senior leadership has doubled down on reconceptualizing “strategic deterrence.”³⁷ In less than a year, during 2022–2023, more than a dozen authors (including the commander of the Strategic Nuclear Missile Forces, his deputies, and other senior officers) published their ideas in Voennaia mysl’ (Military Thought), the flagship journal of the Russian General Staff. They examined the nuclear corps’ future deterrent and war-fighting roles, the nuclear arsenal's modernization and survivability, and how to manipulate Russia's nuclear posture to enhance deterrence.³⁸ This unprecedented deluge of information is simultaneously a coercive disclosure to buy time for Russia to rebuild its conventional might and a statement of intent about how it may allocate resources in the nuclear realm (regardless of Russia's capacity to materialize these aspirations).

The sources unveil that the Russian nuclear establishment's main perceived threat is a U.S. conventional, long-range prompt global strike aimed at decapitating the supreme command and nullifying Russia's nuclear retaliation capacity.³⁹ More important for this article is that these publications reveal emerging organizations and procedures. First, they suggest that the Russian General Staff may be formulating a new concept, Operation of the Strategic Deterrence Forces. If such a strategic operation materializes, it will be a new pattern of using nuclear forces to demonstrate resolve and capability.⁴⁰ Second, the Russian defense establishment may be seeking to set up a new national-level organization to plan, execute, and evaluate deterrence operations.⁴¹ Both the concept of the deterrence operation and the organization responsible for its execution are novelties—they do not exist in Russia or worldwide.⁴²

These calls of the military echo several Russian authors’ prewar and interwar ideas. In 2021, one group of leading Russian defense intellectuals urged the Kremlin to introduce a procedure comparable to net-assessment, which makes it possible to establish the effectiveness of coercive signaling and informs how to plan and execute deterrence operations.⁴³ In late 2024, another group of authors amplified these calls in a report for the Kremlin on the operational art of deterrence.⁴⁴ In theory, among other things, this function that is comparable to net-assessment should prevent Russia from crossing the culmination point of deterrence.

As of this writing, it is unclear if this strategic operation will rely exclusively on nuclear forces and non-nuclear strategic (offensive and defensive) weapons, or if it will include other forms of coercive influence (conventional, nonconventional, sub-conventional, and nonmilitary), as is customary in deterrence à la russe. It is also unclear how this concept will relate to the other types of Russian strategic operations. The emerging national-level organization's structure and responsibilities are also unclear. In the next sections, I present some possible doctrinal-conceptual challenges that this organization and its operations may face.

In this section, I outline the conceptual novelties that are likely to emerge in the near term as Russia refines its coercion mechanism and escalation management theory. These themes stem from Russian defense analysts’ prewar claims that the Kremlin's escalation ladder and coercive signaling lack sophistication, and from wartime lessons on the same matters.

intermediate rungs on the escalation ladder. During the prewar decade, Russian deterrence experts urged practitioners to expand the coercive rungs on the escalation ladder. They called to develop a capacity to climb, descend, and skip over these rungs without both losing coercive tension and producing inadvertent escalation.⁴⁵ Two likely candidates for new intermediate rungs are informational coercion and chemical weapons (third-generation nonlethal munitions).

For several years before the 2022 full-scale invasion, Russian experts had been focusing on informational coercion, an area that traditionally received less attention than Russia's nuclear and conventional programs. The Russian expert community has framed the confrontation with the West as a “civilizational contest.”⁴⁶ Experts have turned “spiritual security” into an object of defense and deterrence⁴⁷ and have developed the concept of “mental war”—a Russian variation on the theme of informational-psychological conflict.⁴⁸

During the war, Russian sources have acknowledged that Russia failed to deter Western mental hybrid aggression. This tactic, in their view, seeks to transform the essence of what it means to be Russian—to change Russia's traditional values, mentality, and strategic culture.⁴⁹ The argument is as follows: A subversive change to the victim's value system forces it to make ideological concessions that in turn lead to further concessions in the geopolitical, military, and economic realms. The adversary destroys the victim's social system and demoralizes and neutralizes the military without kinetic violence.⁵⁰ In response, as part of reconstituting Russia's strategic deterrence, Russian experts examine offensive and defensive ways to conduct mental war, including forceful and nonforceful coercion against cognitive-cultural aggression.⁵¹ Russian experts’ interest in informational coercion may account for the increase in theorizing about Russia's “strategic culture” concept and its policy applications.⁵²

Another new rung on Russia's escalation ladder may be chemical weapons (lethal and nonlethal). During the last decade, Russian experts have explored how Russia might use a new generation of chemical weapons, especially nonlethal munitions, for coercion and on the battlefield. Nonlethal chemical weapons that do not violate legal prohibitions featured as an innovative tool of intra-war coercion. In addition, Russian discourse mentions this capability as a tool of informational coercion, when false flag operations justify subsequent escalatory steps.⁵³

On the escalation ladder, the Russian military may view nonlethal chemical weapons as a rung preceding conventional fire systems and nuclear deterrence. In this way, as with cyber and radio electronic operations, the military can use nonlethal chemical weapons as it transitions from nonforceful to forceful coercion.⁵⁴ The likelihood that the new generation of nonlethal chemical munitions will become an element of strategic deterrence is greater than ever. Using lethal chemical weapons as a step preceding nuclear coercion is less likely, but still possible.

the operational art of strategic gestures. Today, the Kremlin expects the military to expand its repertoire of nuclear saber-rattling options in order to coerce its adversaries on the conventional battlefield without nuclear use. In response to this demand, Russian strategists have started to view the war in Ukraine as an opportunity to learn and experiment with the art of “strategic gestures”—a Russian euphemism for nuclear and non-nuclear activities intended to deter and compel adversaries.⁵⁵

In contrast to reflexive control, strategic gestures imply overt, albeit ambiguous, signaling to the adversary. The gestures may include manipulating alert levels, conducting exercises and demonstrative deployments, and even limited nuclear use. Dissuading the adversary from taking a certain course of action and compelling it to take another path is the desired effect of this art of demonstrating capability and resolve.⁵⁶

In Ukraine, the Russian supreme command may attempt to kill two birds with one stone; it can test the concept of strategic gestures (what Western scholars call “learning by friction” or “learning by doing”) as it recharges the batteries of deterrence.⁵⁷ Defense intellectuals and public figures have already started to refine this art.⁵⁸ Statements about the Kremlin playing Russian roulette with the nuclear bullet “demonstratively inserted into the revolver” represent a coercive signal. At the same time, these statements are a call for the Russian defense establishment to fill a deficit in the realm of strategic gestures.⁵⁹ Examples of unrhetorical experiments with this art include: when the Russian parliament decided to withdraw from the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and postpone a new START treaty; when senior leaders visited the nuclear testing range in the Arctic; when Russia deployed nonstrategic nuclear weapons to Belarus (which included upgrading Belarusian conventional air and ground weapon systems into nuclear capable ones) and dual-capable strategic bombers in the region bordering Finland and Sweden. One may situate statements about renewal of nuclear tests in the same category.

Included in the category of more actionable strategic gestures are more frequent nuclear forces’ staff exercises, maneuvers to launch intercontinental ballistic missile and hypersonic long-range dual-use precision guided munitions from the ground, bolstering naval and air platforms of the nuclear triad, and elevating alert levels. The boldest strategic gestures have been a joint Russian-Belarusian nonstrategic nuclear weapons exercise, publishing the updated nuclear doctrine to extend the nuclear umbrella to allies and to conventional conflicts with non-nuclear proxies of nuclear states, and using the nuclear capable Oreshnik missiles.

During 2022–2023, a group of influential Russian defense intellectuals and national security experts urged the Kremlin to expand the list of strategic gestures and to start practicing them immediately.⁶⁰ More assertive nuclear activities may include preparing for and even conducting nuclear tests and nuclear patrols and deployments abroad. The purpose of these activities would be to restore Moscow's strategic reputation and refine its operational art of deterrence rather than to support Russia's efforts on the battlefield.

This group of defense intellectuals has been urging the Kremlin to switch Russia's coercion strategy from deterrence, which they see as reactive and inefficient, to “intimidation,” which they see as proactive and more promising.⁶¹ In other words, they urge Russia to switch from a defensive to an offensive modus operandi in coercive activities, both forceful and nonforceful. As of this writing, the Kremlin appears to have embraced the idea that it should transform its deterrence strategy along the proposed lines. But it is unclear how receptive it is to each of these proposals.

the impact of artificial intelligence. A related novel conceptual activity is Russia's work on how AI, machine learning, and big data analytics may affect the operational art of deterrence.⁶² Russia has been working on these subjects since before the war,⁶³ but its efforts are still in the initial stages.⁶⁴ Before 2022, Russia focused on how machines might assist humans to decipher coercive signals and tailor them to targets of deterrence. It also investigated how various autonomy settings communicate the credibility of resolve and capability, and in which settings machines can reduce or increase unintended escalation.⁶⁵

Russia has continued to focus on these questions during the war. Defense officials and military experts study the impact of AGI on all stages of a deterrence campaign (operational design and planning, execution, and evaluation) and examine the capacity of the human-machine interface to neutralize detrimental emotions and cognitive biases when processing intelligence. This capacity can increase the accuracy and tempo of decision-making in deterrence operations and the credibility of coercion in the nuclear, conventional, sub-conventional, and informational realms. Russian experts have been examining which decisions should and should not be delegated to machines based on strategic, ideological, and normative considerations. They have also been exploring the implications for strategic stability, including the risks of a security dilemma and inadvertent escalation if two adversaries use AGI. Russian experts predict that in the next five years AGI use will become part of deterrence operations worldwide.⁶⁶

As the Kremlin continues to look for competitive advantages vis-à-vis the West, Russia perceives that it has significant competitive opportunities in AI. Discussions about how to optimize deterrence in the age of the AI revolution in military affairs are likely to spike within the Russian defense establishment.

During the war, unique ideational climates have been emerging within and outside the Russian defense establishment. These are likely to inform and shape how Russia adapts its coercion theory and practice.

Preemption and early nuclear use are among the key ideas that have been circulating within the Russian defense establishment before and during the war in Ukraine.⁶⁷ Some Western experts argue that one of the main Russian takeaways from Ukraine for any future war with NATO is “to opt for early use, in order to seek victory or to prevent defeat from the position of conventional inferiority.”⁶⁸ Indeed, several Russian experts in 2023 began to publicly promote lowering the nuclear threshold. In their reading, early limited nuclear use bolsters Russia's deterrence and forces the adversary to respect Moscow's red lines. Doing so, they argue, is unlikely to lead to a global nuclear exchange.⁶⁹

Russia's advocacy of early limited nuclear use relates to Ukraine only partially. It is a variation on the theme of “prevention” (uprezhdenie or preventivnye deistviia), which emerged several years before the war. The idea has always existed in Russian strategic thought, but the war in Ukraine has reinforced this school of thought conceptually and bureaucratically.⁷⁰

Several stimuli account for the prewar interest in the topic of prevention. First, Russian sources view preemptive and early first use as reciprocal measures. They believe that the United States is lowering the nuclear threshold and views a limited nuclear war as manageable.⁷¹ They have also asserted that U.S. policymakers have an “escalate to de-escalate” approach—whereby Washington would use a nuclear weapon to coerce other states to surrender—even as the United States accuses Moscow of adopting this framework.⁷²

Second, before Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, the fear of a surprise missile strike on the critical infrastructure, nuclear arsenal, and national command and control centers predisposed some Russian military theoreticians to contemplate preemption. In their estimation, the adversary's offensive and interception capabilities nullify Russia's launch-on-warning posture and second-strike capacity. Among the Russian high command, many believe that preemption is the only way to repulse an adversary's attempt to militarily knock out Russia.⁷³

Finally, Russia is inclined toward prevention because of how it perceives the time factor in modern war—specifically the agility and speed of the long-range hypersonic systems that underlie U.S. global missile defense and prompt global strike. Senior officers see it as more important to disrupt any forthcoming aggression than to succeed in the initial stage of war. On the eve of the invasion, several Russian military experts presented prevention as the only option to deter a large-scale war or to prevent a simmering conflict from evolving into massive fighting.⁷⁴ Apparently, in 2022 the Russian Ministry of Defense and General Staff charged military theoreticians with developing doctrines and organizational solutions related to a preventive strategic strike. The outcome would be a coherent deterrence concept that could drive Russia's weapons procurement and doctrine for the full range of conflicts that it would face.⁷⁵ Also indicative of this preemption climate was Vladimir Putin's framing of the invasion of Ukraine as preventive military action aimed at preventing the colossal costs of tomorrow's war.⁷⁶

The prewar discourse designated novel non-nuclear strategic weapons as the main tool of prevention.⁷⁷ Yet as of this writing, it is unclear which arsenal enables this option. Another conundrum relates to intelligence in support of preemption. Before the war, Russian sources contemplating the general notion of prevention indicated that there was a demand for credible evidence about inevitable aggression as a precondition for preventive strike. They hinted at certain novelties (possibly AI) that could enable such a diagnosis.⁷⁸ The Kremlin's intelligence blunder on the eve of the war, however, underscores the dangers of miscalculation in preemption. The unprecedented spike in Russian academics examining a surprise attack from the perspective of the victim may be also related to the interest in preemption.⁷⁹

In sum, despite deficient concepts and capabilities, the notion of prevention, even though a vague collection of ideas, is likely to inform how Russian plans to reconstitute its strategic deterrence, escalation dominance, and intra-war coercion. The concept merges with Russian nuclear experts’ calls to reduce the nuclear threshold in order to increase the credibility of Russia's coercive potential.

Moscow launched the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 at the peak of a decades-old nexus between the Orthodox Church and the nuclear establishment—a singularity known as Russian nuclear orthodoxy. This political myth, which Putin himself endorses, is the belief that nuclear weapons and traditional values are the two pillars of Russia's statehood and the guarantors of national security. To preserve its national character, Russia must be a strong nuclear power, and vice versa; to guarantee Russia's nuclear status, it must preserve its traditional values as the main source of the nation's spiritual-moral well-being. Although in some ways this phenomenon is a ritualistic façade, it does illustrate the zeitgeist—the mixture of politicized religious philosophy, conservatism, nationalism, and militarism in Russia today.⁸⁰ These concepts are likely to inform how the Kremlin modernizes Russia's deterrence.

Nuclear orthodoxy shapes how Russia approaches deterrence in two realms. First, the Kremlin apparently has been using its public image as a faith-driven actor to foster coercion.⁸¹ Before and during the war, the Kremlin and its propagandists have blended nuclear posturing with eschatological rhetoric. This may have been an intentional strategy to enhance coercive bargaining. The patriarch's apocalyptic rhetoric, occasionally in unison with civilian nuclear threats, apparently assists Moscow in sending credible coercive signals. The image of being staunchly religious provides an actor with a reputation that secular actors lack. Adversaries might perceive religious actors as undeterrable and prepared to bet against the odds—an image that may enhance the credibility of their threats.⁸² If the Kremlin is deliberately exploiting religion to enhance coercion, Russian strategists are likely to explore its effectiveness in the future and be inclined to merge messianic rhetoric and escalatory signaling. The national security elite is likely to continue using this tactic in order to maintain ambiguity and increase Western confusion.

Another phenomenon that might weaken the nuclear taboo relates to the extraordinary pronuclear climate that has emerged in Russia. During the war, nuclear weapons have become a popular topic. The notion that using them should be a last resort but not an unthinkable option has become routine in the media and has framed common thinking about escalation.⁸³ Also contributing to the new nuclear normal in Russia are the messianic-existential aura that the Kremlin and the Russian Orthodox Church have given this war and the ecclesiastical legitimization of nuclear assertiveness.⁸⁴ Wartime folklore (militaristic songs, videos, performances, and heraldry) features religious-apocalyptic motifs, venerates nuclear might, threatens nuclear use, and is eroding the taboo.⁸⁵

How nuclear normalization came about in Russia is unclear. It may be a natural, bottom-up phenomenon that stems from the wartime zeitgeist. Violence and brutality have become routine in the public consciousness, and the bellicose environment has radicalized the population.⁸⁶ It is also possible that the Kremlin is deliberately cultivating normalization to enhance its saber-rattling, restore its coercion credibility, bolster its deterrence, and prepare the domestic and international public for further nuclear gambits, including possible use. Nuclear threats might seem more credible if citizens appear willing to risk Armageddon. It could also be a combination of the two. The phenomenon first emerged as a bottom-up development, which the Kremlin then co-opted.

If the Kremlin has “worked to get Russians to embrace nuclear use, the tail might now be wagging the dog.”⁸⁷ Apparently, recurring belligerent nuclear rhetoric—official and unofficial alike—has made nuclear use more conceivable in the public's consciousness and somewhat eroded the nuclear taboo, even if unintentionally. Nuclear public discourse appears to have acquired a life of its own. Apparently, Russian defense intellectuals, nuclear experts, and even Putin find the Russian public's widespread levity about nuclear use to be shocking.⁸⁸

The state's embrace of nuclear innovations coupled with the societal nuclear normalization has major implications. First, this climate makes it easier for Russia to flex its nuclear muscles and even to consider nuclear first use. This is especially alarming if the Kremlin and the military brass, already frustrated that the West has neglected Russia's nuclear saber-rattling, sense that Russia's coercive potential needs a recharge. Russian deployment of the nuclear arsenal in Belarus hints at the possibility of extended deterrence gambits elsewhere; a reluctance to engage in arms control, the spike in nuclear exercises, the experts’ advocacy of preventive nuclear use, and suggestions to carry out a nuclear test are all steps in this direction.

Second, the pronuclear climate provides justification for Russia's plans to allocate resources to modernize its arsenal. It also makes nuclear coercion a morally acceptable tool. This further strengthens those members of the security elite who call for intertwining spirituality and physical deterrence, and it fuels an ideology that mixes nationalism, messianism, and militarism. The veneration of nuclear might inside and outside the establishment has already stimulated Russia to develop nuclear-religious jurisprudence—a theological explanation for when, how, and why it may be appropriate to use nuclear weapons.⁸⁹

Finally, there are implications for nuclear operators. During 2023, the intangible aspects of nuclear command and control (i.e., nuclear operators’ psychological state, loyalty, motivation, morale, discipline, and ideological orientation) and the operators’ vulnerability to adversarial informational subversion drew attention from the nuclear establishment in Russia.⁹⁰ How the eroding nuclear taboo and the Kremlin's nuclear assertiveness affect the stability of command and control is a conundrum. One could argue that the new nuclear normal reinforces the likelihood that nuclear operators will obey commands from the leadership to carry out escalatory nuclear orders. Under conditions of civil-military instability, however, it is conceivable that nuclear operators might become more inclined toward disobedience and unsanctioned use.

In sum, these unique intellectual climates inside and outside the establishment and the concepts that derive from them—lowering the nuclear threshold, preventive early nuclear use, eroding the nuclear taboo, and a nuclear theology—are mutually reinforcing. They are likely to inform how the Russian establishment and nuclear operators interpret nuclear use and make it more psychologically permissible. Russia will reconstitute its deterrence theory, strategy, and nuclear innovations against the backdrop of these ideational environments.

This article offers a framework for examining coercion strategy outside the Western intellectual tradition. I have argued that various cultures hold different beliefs and theories about the art of strategy in general and the operational art of deterrence in particular. I described the main features of deterrence à la russe, the traits of Russian strategic culture that have shaped it, and I offered hypotheses about how the war in Ukraine affects Russia's approach to deterrence and intra-war coercion. As of this writing, deterrence as a subject of study is one of the main themes in the Russian international security discipline and national security strategy.⁹¹ In the foreseeable future, the Russian expert community is likely to redouble its efforts to refine this tool of statecraft, especially in the nuclear realm. It is also likely to engage in dialogue with the strategic communities in the United States and Global South on these matters.⁹²

For defense planners considering protracted geopolitical competitions and foreign military innovations, this article has identified the trends in Russian strategic thought and highlighted the intricacies of how Russia approaches coercion. The diagnosis that this article offers may help to mitigate the risks of misestimating Russian military power and strategic behavior in the near and long terms. This understanding reduces the risk of inadvertent escalations and begins to create conditions for crafting strategic stability after the war in Ukraine.

Theoretically, the article has offered a general approach, which merges cultural-ideational lenses with models of strategic studies. For scholars of international security, it has provided an analytical method to address the same questions in other states that deal with the operational art of deterrence and merge religion and strategy in nuclear affairs.

This article has three main implications for theory and practice. First, like in other wartime transformations, a complex conceptual-bureaucratic dynamic is likely to influence how Russia reconstitutes its deterrence strategy and theory.⁹³ The major Soviet and Russian military innovations over the last hundred years suggest that intra- and inter-service competitions and nonstrategic considerations will shape Russia's defense transformation almost as much as strategic-doctrinal deliberations. In previous innovations, several schools of thought and theories of victory have vied for resources and influence.⁹⁴ Similarly, today, conceptual and organizational incoherencies, suboptimal choices, and nonstrategic considerations may shape Russian innovative thinking, policy choices, and behavior in the realm of strategic deterrence.

If Russia relies even more on its nuclear coercion, the result may be budgetary trade-offs between the conventional and nonconventional realms. Bureaucratic coalitions that compete for resources are likely to emerge. This pattern is not unprecedented. In the 1990s, similar circumstances produced clashes within the defense establishment on budget allocations, state armaments programs, and military reform.⁹⁵ Bureaucratic competitions during military transformations are a universal phenomenon. What is unique to Russia is that these rivalries express themselves in competing “scientific visions.” Thus, it is likely that Russian experts will present conflicting conceptions about the emerging character of war and how to adjust Russia's deterrence.⁹⁶

The current war is also reshaping who has influence within the Russian strategic community, not least because of the reshuffling of the defense elite. In an era of austerity and against the backdrop of an emerging military aristocracy, the brass from the conventional and nuclear services are likely to compete for resources and influence. As of this writing, the contours of these new conceptual-bureaucratic coalitions are just emerging. The competitive dynamic between these schools of thought will also inform how Russia transforms its strategic deterrence. Scholars who study Russia, international security, or comparative politics may wish to factor the above propositions into their analyses.

The second practical implication relates to the dangers of escalation in the era of integrated deterrence. During the Cold War, there was an asymmetry in the strategic competition that unfolded: The United States leaned heavily on deterrence strategy and developed the theory supporting it, whereas the Soviet Union, despite buying into the logic of mutual assured destruction, regarded deterrence and limited nuclear war as doctrinal heresy. The contemporary situation is different; both states are competing to learn about the operational art of deterrence and doubling down on the integrated approach to this strategy.

Whatever officials on both sides of the Atlantic mean by integrated deterrence, it is a buzzword in the communities of practice in the United States and NATO. Moreover, the current move toward integration in the West is catching up with deterrence à la russe.⁹⁷ Over the last thirty years, the Russian concept of strategic deterrence has focused on integrating coercive programs across nonmilitary and military domains. Western pundits have already explored the risks of inadvertent escalation that have arisen in the current era.⁹⁸ This article has highlighted another potential source of such escalation. I suggest that when competitors from different strategic cultures use an integrated approach to coercion against one other, the chances of misperception, miscommunication, and inadvertent escalation increase exponentially. One of the main features of the integrated approach is a capacity for asymmetrical moves—that is, responding to friction in one domain with tools from another. Arguably, NATO's and Russia's inclination toward integrated deterrence increases the chances of crossing the culmination point (i.e., it can cause both sides to overreact).

For example, Russia's strategy is to use nuclear coercion to compensate for its conventional inferiorities. Western political warfare—or what Moscow views as informational coercion against Russia's collective mentality—is more of a menace for the Kremlin than nuclear or conventional threats. Moscow perceives political warfare as a threat to Russia's vital interests and even as an existential threat reminiscent of its biggest strategic defeat—the collapse of the Soviet Union. Many Russians believe that this was a success of Western informational subversion, since all the Soviet nuclear and conventional arsenals remained intact. Thus, the Kremlin is likely to counter asymmetrically (using cyber, kinetic, or nuclear measures) if it assumes that it is incapable of retaliating in kind and feels cornered. Yet Moscow's red lines and the level of unacceptable damage by non-nuclear actors against it that may provoke Russian nuclear reaction, intentionally or inadvertently, remain a conundrum.⁹⁹

This article also makes a theoretical contribution to the literatures on military innovations and nuclear strategy. Battlefields in Ukraine and in the Middle East have become laboratories for learning about the current character of war and have stimulated an interest in conventional and nuclear intra-war coercion worldwide.

Although it is still unknown what lessons Russia will draw about the new norms of using military force, it is clear that actors from different military traditions may look at the same wars but ask different questions or give different answers to the same queries.¹⁰⁰ The lessons for the operational art of deterrence from the Russian-Ukrainian War and from the Israeli operations in the Middle East since October 2023 are likely to vary too. This variance matters—I argue that there will be a repertoire of theories about coercion rather than a universal strategy. For example, some Russian defense intellectuals are calling for Russia to develop an indigenous non-Western theory of deterrence and diffuse it among communities of practice in the Global South.¹⁰¹ A competition of learning about the operational art of deterrence among current and potential members of the nuclear club is gathering momentum. I suggest that China, Iran, and Russia have merged into a knowledge-sharing community on the matter of cross-domain coercion.

Analyzing and understanding foreign military innovations, strategies of deterrence specifically, demands the qualities of a fox and a hedgehog, to use Isaiah Berlin's aphorism on scientific approaches. In other words, understanding deterrence strategy requires combining specificity with universality. The idiosyncratic features of a given strategic culture help to contextualize a universal paradigm of deterrence that international security theory promotes. Berlin saw Tolstoy's narrative in War and Peace as a good example of capturing the middle ground between the two scientific credos.¹⁰² This article has sought to examine deterrence à la russe in such a contextualized way. It has used the singularities of the Russian approach, which emanate from strategic culture, national mentality, and military and intelligence traditions, to highlight the emerging transformations of the Russian theory and strategy of deterrence. Scholars of international security can replicate this approach to examine other cases of coercion worldwide.

This article builds on ideas from three books published by Stanford University Press: The Culture of Military Innovations: The Impact of Cultural Factors on the Revolution in Military Affairs in Russia, the US, and Israel (2010); The Russian Nuclear Orthodoxy: Religion, Politics, and Strategy (2019); and The Russian Way of Deterrence: Strategic Culture, Coercion, and War (2023).