In early May, French President Emmanuel Macron said he would send French troops to Ukraine if Kyiv requested their help. Shortly after, Britain gave Ukraine permission to use British weapons to strike targets on Russian soil. Putin counterpunched immediately with his “nuclear blackmail” gambit. On May 6, he ordered Russian troops to prepare to use tactical nuclear weapons — so-called “small” nukes that are as powerful the bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945 which killed 180,000. Putin is the first leader in history to play a nuclear escalation game in response to major threats, after battlefield setbacks, or simply to frighten allies. In 2022, he placed his nuclear forces on “high alert” to scare off NATO help, but Ukrainians mostly ignore it and urged allies to do the same. “I don’t think he’s bluffing. He wants to scare the whole world. These are the first steps of his nuclear blackmail,” said President Volodymyr Zelensky in 2022, who added “we need to keep putting pressure on him and not allow him to continue.”
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