War of words with Medvedev sparks revival of real nuclear escalation

(Originaly published Aug. 5 in “What in the World“) Trump isn’t just about trade wars. He’s now taken up his predecessor’s deepening Cold War with Russia in Europe.

Trump criticized former President Joe Biden for dragging the United States into a proxy war with Russia in Ukraine. But, disappointed that he can’t seem to convince Russian President Vladimir Putin to stop bombing Ukraine ahead of armistice talks, Trump has launched a war of words with Putin’s own social-media proxy, former Russian President Dmitri Medvedev. Only the consequences of their thumb war are starting to translate into a revival of the military escalation that characterized Biden’s term.

It started a little over a week ago, when Trump threatened to impose new sanctions on Russia if Putin didn’t end the war in 50 days. Medvedev took to X to warn Trump that: “Each new ultimatum is a threat and a step towards war. Not between Russia and Ukraine, but with his own country. Don’t go down the Sleepy Joe road!”

Trump rose to the bait, calling Medvedev a “failed former President of Russia” and said he had better “watch his words.” Medvedev, who is now deputy chairman of Russia’s Security Council, responded on Telegram that Trump should remember “how dangerous the fabled ‘Dead Hand’ can be” — a reference to Russia’s secretive, fail-safe system that launches its nuclear arsenal if Moscow’s leadership is somehow eliminated.

Then sh*t got real. Trump announced on his own social media platform, Truth Social, that he was responding to Medvedev’s “highly provocative statements” by ordering “two nuclear submarines to be positioned in the appropriate regions.” He didn’t say where exactly, or whether the submarines were nuclear-powered or armed with nuclear missiles.

But on Friday, Putin confirmed what Washington and Europe have long known: that Russia has been deploying nuclear-capable Oreshnik intermediate-range missiles in Belarus and using them against Ukraine. The Oreshniks Russia fired into Ukraine last November had multiple independently targetable re-entry vehicles, or MIRVs.

Using the Oreshniks violated the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, which banned ground-launched ballistic and cruise missiles with ranges of 500 to 5,500 kilometers. But Trump pulled out of the treaty in 2019 during his first term, saying Russia had already been violating it by deploying 9M729 cruise missiles. So, on Monday, Russia’s Foreign Ministry confirmed that Moscow no longer intended to observe the treaty.

Why did Russia roll out the Oreshnik in the first place? It did so after Biden’s decision to allow Ukraine to fire long-range Western missiles against targets inside Russia. It was last November that Ukraine fired U.S. Atacms at targets into Bryansk province, and British Storm Shadow cruise missiles into Kursk province. “In response to the use of American and British long-range weaponry, on 21 November this year,” Russian President Vladimir Putin said, “the Russian armed forces carried out a combined strike on one of Ukraine’s military-industrial complex sites.”

The Oreshnik missile caused what Ukrainian officials said was only minor damage at a military factory in Ukraine’s Dnipro, prompting outrage among Russia’s conservative critics about wasting missile technology. But officials determined that the Oreshnik’s multiple warheads weren’t even loaded with any explosives. That, and the fact that Russia fired a missile with a 5,000km range to hit a target just 700km away, gave rise to a theory that Moscow was merely conducting very public tests of a weapon it is threatening to use not against Ukraine, but against Europe.

Russia’s decision to level that threat came in response to an announcement in July last year by the U.S. and Germany that the U.S. would return long-range missiles to Germany for the first time since the Cold War. The missiles were removed as part of the INF treaty. The U.S. said it would begin deploying SM-6, Tomahawk, and hypersonic weapons in Germany in 2026. Russia’s deputy foreign minister responded by saying that Moscow would prepare countermeasures to the missiles’ deployment. The Oreshniks were apparently that countermeasure.

The U.S. and Germany justified their move by saying it was needed as a stopgap until Europe could bolster its own defensive missile network against Russia’s growing threat. That threat was made evident by Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, an invasion Putin justified as a response to moves by the U.S. and its European allies to the expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization into Russia’s former Soviet satellites in Eastern Europe and moves to draw Ukraine into NATO.

And here’s where Trump’s trade war comes full circle to meet Ye Olde Colde Warr: Trump says he’s going to ratchet up tariffs against India to punish it for buying Russian oil and thereby funding Putin’s war against Ukraine.