Russia summons UK ambassador to complain about "offensive rhetoric."

My first reaction when I heard that the British Ambassador has been summoned to the Kremlin and handed a note complaining about 

“offensive rhetoric from representatives of the UK authorities.” 

was “Truth hurts, doesn't it Vlad?” 

I had assumed that this might refer to various statements of the obvious from government ministers such as the PM's comment this week that the Russian President's forces had inflicted "barbaric" actions on Ukraine. If bombing maternity hospitals and shopping malls or tying up civilians and shooting them in the back isn't barbaric, I don't know what is, 

But as the Evening Standard report says, "It was not immediately clear what specific remarks the statement was referring to.” 

When I read what the one specific complaint reported to be in the letter that Russia's foreign ministry handed to Britain's ambassador, I was left scratching my head:  The ministry said Russia had told her it objected to British statements containing “deliberately false information, in particular about alleged Russian ‘threats to use nuclear weapons’”.

If there is one area in which UK, US and Western leaders have generally been pretty careful in their language it has been in response to statements by both Putin and his close allies about nuclear weapons.

And what's all this about "alleged" threats?

At the end of February, within days of invading Ukraine Putin announced that he had instructed Russia's military chiefs to put Russia's nuclear weapons on high alert.

At the beginning of May pro-Putin Russian state TV host Dmitry Kiselyov displayed a video purporting to show how a single Russian Sarmat missile could turn Britain into a "radioactive desert", adding "a single launch, Boris, and there is no England."

In mid May, Aleksey Zhuravlyov, the deputy chairman of the Kremlin’s defence committee and member of the Russian Duma (parliament,)  claimed Finland could be hit in 10 seconds with the Satan-2 hypersonic missile and that Russia could crush the Baltic states ‘like peanuts,’ adding that the missiles could hit Britain in less than four minutes.

On Monday 30th May he was at it again, saying on Russian state TV that Russia could destroy the entire East and West cost of the USA with just four nuclear missiles and 'there will be nothing left' on either coast.

Just a week ago a close political ally of Vladimir Putin has warned London will be bombed first if World War 3 breaks out. Andrey Gurulyov, another member of the Russian Duma’s defence committee, made the threat to Britain on the state-run Rossiya 1 channel, saying . “The first to be hit will be London.”

I think we need to be very careful to recognise what Russia is and is not doing here.

I don't believe for a second that the hard men in the Kremlin are daft enough to want to start a nuclear war. Once the nukes start flying literally nobody on the planet is safe, including themselves, and anyone who isn't clinically insane knows that. Only if facing an existential threat, or first use of nuclear weapons by the West (which will not happen) or China (which won't happen either) would they actually use nuclear weapons.

It is possible that the protest about Britain accusing them of making threats of nuclear war, even though they really have made such threats, is just propaganda: it is also possible that it is designed to reinforce the signal that they will not use nuclear weapons first unless NATO actually invades Russia (which is another thing which is absolutely not going to happen.)  

What the Kremlin is doing by putting Putin allies on state TV to make these blood-curdling threats is warning the West about the risks if the war escalates to a direct confrontation between NATO and the Russian Federation. Doubtless they also hope that fear of such a confrontation might persuade Western countries to send less aid to Ukraine than might otherwise be the case.

NATO does have to make sure we don't get into a direct shooting war with Russia unless we are forced into it by a direct Russian attack on a NATO member state. Equally, we must not allow these threats to stop us sending assistance of all kinds to Ukraine.

One other thought. Western leaders have been extremely critical of the Putin regime since his illegal invasion of Ukraine began - and vice versa. If Putin is now starting to get sensitive about this, it is probably a sign that the Kremlin is increasingly worried about how their war is going.