Could Russia’s Kaliningrad threats trigger a nuclear crisis with NATO

0:00Russia's president has just made it clear that his country is prepared to use its whole range of weapons if NATO tries to cut off the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad. Vladimir Putin's comments follow an explicit warning from Moscow to NATO in the form of a letter that said that Russia could use nuclear weapons if alliance members tried to isolate the territory. Here's Vladimir Putin issuing a stark warning about what would happen if Kaliningrad or other Russian territory came under direct attack. If it comes to a direct attack on the Russian federation, in this case we are referring to Kaliningrad, but perhaps other territories as well, then of course the question of the Russian federation deploying all types of weapons that our countries disposal will inevitably and immediately be on the agenda. Well the message sent to NATO says that Russia could use its entire arsenal, including nuclear

1:04weapons, if Kaliningrad were isolated. So why does this small piece of Russian territory? Why does it matter so much? Kaliningrad sits on the Baltic Sea separated from the rest of Russia and sandwiched between NATO members Poland and Lithuania. It's also heavily militarized, home to Russia's Baltic fleet, air defenses and nuclear capable ex-Gundar missiles. But look just to Kaliningrad's southeast between Kaliningrad and Russia's close ally Belarus lies a narrow stretch of Polish Lithuanian border known as the Suwaki gap. Now the gap is strategically important because it provides the land connection between NATO's Baltic members and the rest of the NATO alliance. Reuters reports that dozens of NATO aircraft took part in an unannounced operation around Kaliningrad back in August. With Russia now saying that NATO must not try to isolate the

2:05territory, the European Union says that Moscow's nuclear warning is an attempt to intimidate the West and that it won't play a law. The EU will not fall for the Russian trip and we will not amplify Moscow's tactics of intimidation and scaremongering. And joining me now is Heather Williams. She's director of the project on nuclear issues at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Her research examines Russia's nuclear threats and how to prevent them from becoming a nuclear war. Heather, it's good to have you on the program. The head of NATO, Mark Ruta, said yesterday, I don't take this that seriously. Do you share that confidence? Is anything about this warning different from the threats that we've heard from the Kremlin before? Well, thank you for having me and I somewhat share that assessment. This is familiar territory. Russia has consistently used nuclear threats since it began its invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

3:09Just days after the invasion began, in fact, President Putin said that he would be changing the country's nuclear alert status. Since then, there have been dozens, if not hundreds, of explicit or implicit threats on the part of the Kremlin. So this is familiar what they're doing. At the same time, it's nuclear weapons. It's nuclear threats. And so we should always be pretty concerned a little bit on edge about this. I do also think that the timing of these threats in particular is a bit unique. And the nature of the threats and talking about maritime blockades, that's something new that we're seeing. Why do you say the timing is unique? Yeah, the threat in particular, I think it's unique in three ways. One of them is that it's over Kaliningrad. Typically, Russia's threats have been about Ukraine trying to deter NATO intervention or support for Ukraine. Kaliningrad is somewhat new addition to its playbook in terms of

4:12making these types of statements. So that's one thing that's a little bit different. The other aspect that I found somewhat surprising quite frankly is how explicitly it was directed at NATO member states. The way in which this threat was communicated, it was directly to embassies, it was direct diplomatic statements. This was not, you know, a late-night tweet. This wasn't something coming from a press secretary equivalent. This could not have been more clear and being directed at NATO. The other, the final aspect that I thought was a bit different, as I said, it is the maritime aspect to this. This could have something to do with increased NATO exercises, increased NATO naval exercises. But I also think it has a lot to do with Russia's shadow fleet, which has been incredibly active. But we know that in recent years, European countries have had more interventions with the shadow fleet. According to one report, there were, I believe,

5:14six to nine interceptions just in the first six months of 2026. So clearly, the maritime angle here is different and it's something that's important to Moscow. And Moscow is claiming that NATO is preparing a blockade. Is there any evidence to support that claim? I have seen no evidence of that whatsoever. It could just suggest that Russia genuinely is concerned about a blockade of Cohen and Gratis. Some state, Cohen and Gratis is in a bit of a unique and vulnerable position geographically, as it's a Russian enclave. It's not attached to the Russian homeland, so it doesn't really have the strategic depth benefits that the rest of Russia does. But in terms of any evidence of a blockade or NATO making preparations for that, I haven't seen any publicly available evidence. Okay. I want to pull up something that you wrote. It's been about two years ago. You authored an essay entitled Why Russia Keeps Rattling the Nuclear Sabre. And in it, you write that

6:16Russia keeps making nuclear threats as a means of deterrence and nuclear signaling. But another reason Russia continues to rely on nuclear saber rattling is because it is getting away with it. So has Western caution, as it taught Vladimir Putin, that nuclear blackmailing works? Two years ago, when I first wrote that, I might have said that yes, that is the Kremlin's takeaway. There is evidence to suggest that in the early days of the Ukraine war, some of Russia's threats might have slowed Western intervention and Western support for Ukraine. But since then, the value that Russia is getting from these nuclear threats, it doesn't just seem to be diminishing. It actually seems to be working against Russia. If what Russia was hoping for was that these nuclear threats would divide and weaken NATO, it's had the opposite effect. Arguably Finland and Sweden

7:17joined NATO, specifically because it's a nuclear alliance in the threat of NATO or in the, excuse me, the threat of Russia's nuclear saber rattling. There is one thing from that statement that I do stand by, which is that the international community has been very slow, in my opinion, to condemn Russia's saber rattling. Russia's continued reliance on nuclear weapons, on nuclear threats. This is not being called out in the way that it should be. If we want to make sure that nuclear weapons are never used, that's just not a matter of nuclear deterrence. There is a diplomatic role there as well. And I really would like to see the wider international community beyond NATO members to include China, India, Global South States, calling out Russia's aggression, relying on nuclear threats. You mentioned Russia's shadow fleet. We ask you about a scenario. Suppose NATO stops a Russian ship, and Moscow calls it the start of a blockade. How easily could that become a conflict

8:20that neither side intended? I'm really glad you're asking this, because this is a scenario I am increasingly worried about. The specific reason I am increasingly worried about this is because we know that Russia has started arming. It's Gazprom-LNG tankers. And possibly that's because of concerns about a blockade. But to be clear, our understanding is that they're arming them with machine guns, not with cruise missiles. But if we do have armed Russian tankers out there, and potentially the shadow fleet also is going to be armed, and we do see some incident at sea, that really does worry me, because, as you say, Russia really likes to shape the narrative. They like to take any sort of incident and try to use it to its purposes, to try to divide NATO, to try to build international support for whatever it is that it's trying to do. But you're also hitting on something that this isn't a new problem that we're facing. During the Cold War,

9:22the Soviet Union, the United States were constantly worried about incidents at sea, and that's why they came up with these incident at sea agreements. We don't have anything like that for the current environment tailored to the current crisis scenario that you just outlined. Yeah, I was going to ask you, if an incident like that were to happen tonight, who could actually pick up the phone and call someone and stop it from escalating? I mean, are the military contacts between Russia and NATO? Are they reliable enough right now? I can't speak to that explicitly, because I'm not an official, but there is a decent track record of hotline and crisis communication channels. These were set up right after the Cuban missile crisis to try to avoid something like that from happening again. So we really do need to keep those alive. I will say one particular concern that I have is the lack of more dialogue with Russia. You don't want to just talk to someone in a crisis. You want to talk to them

10:23during the good times as well. You want to understand their perspective. If Russia genuinely is worried about a blockade, that strikes me as a great topic for a US Russia or US Russia China dialogue to understand why is a naval blockade so concerning to you? Is there something we're doing that is making you worried about this that maybe we don't know that we're doing? Or is this a red herring for something else? But Russia has just consistently refused US overtures under Republican and Democrat administrations to re-engage in those sort of strategic stability dialogues or in follow-on arms control agreements. I want to bring you back to Kaliningrad for just a moment. Mark Routes argument is that Russia cannot defeat NATO. But could that become part of the danger here? If Moscow feared losing Kaliningrad in a conventional war, would nuclear weapons then become more tempting? Russia wants us to be asking that question and to be unsure of what

11:28they do. That is part of their deterrence messaging, part of their deterrence strategy. I can tell you what Russia's nuclear doctrine says and how they might respond, but that doesn't mean that's what they'll actually do in the moment. According to Russia's nuclear doctrine, threats to the sovereign territory or also to its strategic forces are conditions under which it would consider nuclear weapons use. Now, it's interesting that in the fall of 2022, there were all these concerns about possible Russian use of nuclear weapons if it was lost on the battlefield in Ukraine. That is and even the Russian homeland. Some Russians might think that it's part of the Russian homeland, but it isn't in the way that Kaliningrad is. Kaliningrad is very explicitly covered by Russia's nuclear doctrine. It's interpretation of sovereign territory. With that, my reading is that Russia's threshold for nuclear use is if it perceives a threat to the survival of Putin's regime and to its sovereign territory. So if there was a belief that the blockade could lead to some sort

12:31of an invasion in Kaliningrad, again, it doesn't have the strategic depth that the Russian homeland does, then that would be a concerning scenario for me. All right. Heather Williams, good to have you on the program. Great getting your insights on this. We appreciate your time tonight. Thank you. Thank you.