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Michal Smetana is an associate professor at the Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University, and director of the Peace Research Center in Prague. Michal Onderco is a professor of international relations in the Department of Public Administration and Sociology at Erasmus University in Rotterdam
In the years since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Kremlin's nuclear saber-rattling has become almost routine. President Vladimir Putin frequently highlights the power of Russia's massive nuclear arsenal in his public speeches, while other Russian politicians and foreign policy experts do not shy away from discussing the possibility of nuclear strikes against Ukraine's Western backers.1 Many NATO countries have taken the threat of nuclear escalation very seriously since the war began, and according to new reporting, the U.S. administration believed that Russia was on the brink of using a tactical nuclear weapon against Ukraine in the second half of 2022.2
Yet, in one of his recent speeches, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy downplayed the threat of Russian nuclear use, arguing that the Russian government would not break the decades-old "nuclear taboo" for fear of losing broad societal support.3 If this argument holds, it would suggest that nuclear employment represents a true redline for the Russian public beyond which the Kremlin can no longer count on popular approval for its foreign policy adventurism. Is there any ground for the claim that a majority of the Russian public would oppose nuclear use, especially if doing so would increase Russian chances for a swift victory in Ukraine or even prevent Russia from losing the war?
In June 2024, we conducted a unique survey experiment in Russia to find out.4 In contrast to vague questions in more traditional public opinion polls, participants in our experiment were provided with very specific hypothetical scenarios in which the Russian government considered nuclear strikes against NATO or Ukraine as a way of averting military defeat.5
We worked together with a local, independent nongovernmental organization in Russia, the Levada Center, to conduct our experiment on a large representative sample of the Russian population. Levada is a trusted partner for numerous Western organizations and media to conduct public opinion research in Russia. Our experiment was embedded in Levada's monthly omnibus survey, which is a Russia-wide poll, with participants coming from large...