What’s Behind Dmitry Medvedev’s Nuclear Saber-Rattling?

The former Russian president is threatening the West over calls for an international tribunal over the invasion of Ukraine.

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After the shock of the Bucha massacre and the steady drip of new Russian atrocities in Ukraine, there is growing interest to set up an international tribunal or some kind of investigation into these crimes. Deputy Chairman of the Russian Security Council and former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev commented on this possibility at a legal forum on July 30:

“It is also senseless to attempt to create tribunals or courts to investigate the circumstances of certain events via particular supranational bodies … I’m not talking here about the practical matters of such steps. This is all gibberish, to be honest. Do these states and individual politicians really believe in the possibility of criminal tribunals against the country with the largest nuclear arsenal? I somehow cannot recall a single successful attempt to arrange such a trial for the numerous military campaigns conducted by the United States in the 20th and 21st centuries.” 

Here we see a pretty typical example of Russian whataboutism mixed with some nuclear bluster. A few days later Medvedev followed it up with a much more frank clarification in a Telegram post. He wanted to make sure that people realized that, “These proposals are not only legally void. The idea of punishing the country that has the largest nuclear arsenal is absurd in itself. And it potentially threatens the existence of mankind.”

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  1. Pohl

    Excellent article. I once agreed about integrating Russia into Western security structures to a certain extent, but it was never leveraged against their renegade behavior so it fizzled out as we now see. I still want to keep them in the European orbit—a project now on a long hiatus, though.

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  2. Duane Truitt

    None of this needs to make any sense. Russia has lost the war in Ukraine already .... it is inevitable that Ukraine will push Russia entirely out of Ukraine when this is done, including Crimea. Until someone in the Russian power structure finally comes to their senses and applies a 9 mm to back of the heads of Putin and Medvedev in the basement of Lubyanka Prison, they are going to attempt to escalate continuously with every new and inevitable setback ... until they either launch a nuclear strike against someone - Ukraine, or possibly even a NATO member, or else the 9mm solution gets applied. I don't see this ending any other way.

    Virtually everyone in the Russian leadership has been hurt greatly by Putin's war, and hurt in the pocketbook where it hurts these thieving kleptocrats the most. There is no ideological glue holding these guys together - it is cold hard cash, mostly dollars, Euros, gold, and real estate. They're gangsters.

    Medvedev and Putin are not clinically insane, but they are clearly unstable megalomaniacs armed with a large nuclear arsenal with which they keep threatening us - something that we never actually faced in the hottest part of the Cold War, including the Cuban missile crisis.

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    Xaveria

    A friend of mine is having a rough divorce at the moment. I don't want to go into details, and don't have to -- it's an embarrassingly cliched midlife crisis on his part, from the shiny new red car to his "running partner" lady friend. What made all this particularly hard for my friend was her particular marital balance, which can be summed up thus: He always blames her for everything. She always blames herself for everything.

    Sometimes that seems to sum up all geopolitics for me. America blames America (or at least, Other America) for all our problems. China blames America for all of China's problems. Russia blames America for all the world's problems. Our self-loathing paralyzes us, while letting them ignore problems of their own making and within their own control.

    It is so depressing to me to see that, even in the face of a looming World War III, Americans cannot be diverted from our destructive self-hatred. I want to say that we defy Medvedev's warnings out of principle and bravery, but the truth is most of the people I know have stopped paying attention. From both sides I get the same thing -- if we do fall, we deserve it. From the right of me, I hear we we deserve because of CRT and broken families and LGBT and Apple's corporate greed. From the left of me, I hear that we deserve it because of Trump and lack of gun control and SCOTUS and Musk's corporate greed. As a country, we are like my friend sobbing on her bed, thinking this is all her fault because she didn't lose enough weight. I want her to get up, tell him he's a whore, and that his girlfriend is a bitch, and go out and live her best life free of the both of them.

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    1. Duane Truitt

      Take heart. Jealous, neurotic failures in life always blame the successful for their problems. We wouldn't be attacked if we weren't succeeding where those other nations are clearly failing. As for internal criticism, most Americans have no interest in castigating America except the America-hating extreme left and, interestingly enough, the America-hating extreme right.

      Obama thought he was o so intellectual and self righteous when he went on his "Blame America Tour" in his first year in office. His polls tanked immediately and of course, he lost Congress in a wipeout for the Dems the following year (they just can't help their poor little selves). Crapping on America is not how to win elections.

      Ignore them all.

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    MatthewRobin

    Before this recent invasion I did not think Putin would try to swallow a country whole, but I was mistaken. Now we need to prepare for the possibility that Russia will try to swallow the Baltic states once they have the military capability. I just wrote part two of a three part series discussing this topic.

    https://infraredline.substack.com/p/from-human-tripwires-to-spiderwebs

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    1. Duane Truitt

      Putin can't swallow anything. He is getting wiped out in Ukraine, he never had enough military force to take and hold even a single major Ukrainian city, let alone the entire nation - exactly as retired General Petraeus stated in a little-noted CNN interview during the first week of the war.

      Putin is locked in a suicide dive to the ground in his decrepit Rooskie dive bomber. He will go out feet first before the ultimate defeat of Russia is realized. The Russian kleptocrats are already smelling blood and self-preservation is the biggest motivation in life for rich thieves. They will take care of Putin sooner or later, unless the cancer gets him first. Their number one object will not be to pretend to be the old Soviet Empire that defeated the Nazis. Their number one object will be to restore their personal riches and power.

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        MatthewRobin

        Your preaching to the choir, I wrote months before Russia's invasion that the forces massed along the border are insufficient to capture Kyiv. The important difference is that Putin has previously only bitten off chuncks of territory and was quite limited in his use of military force. Now that we know he would like to swallow Ukraine but can't we have to revist the defense of the Baltics. Those states are small enough to be swallowed whole.

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    Tmcke

    Of course Medvedev is right. And the US does not participate in the international criminal court. That does not mean that the US cannot hurt Russia in some ways but the powerful avoid many of the consequences of their actions.

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    Chris L

    This article reminds me a lot of what anti-CCP Chinese nationals have been saying to take down CCP. Namely, the Chinese are pretty happy to have such a big middle-class and luxury goods for their elites, but if that money gets taken away, the collapse will be so complete and sudden, it'll make Rome's destruction look downright quaint. This is another reason why China is watching so closely, and why they are increasingly nervous.

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    DougCLE

    I read Medvedev’s nuclear references not as saber-rattling so much as a “what’re you gonna do about it?” in regard to the judgements of any tribunals. He’s right, in the sense he’s using: we are certainly not going to invade Russia to hold a Nuremberg-style tribunal with the possibility of death or imprisonment of perpetrators.

    Where he’s wrong, as Fink points out, is in thinking that we need to. One of the outcomes of the years of “integration” that Fink bemoans is that Russia - the “gas station masquerading as a country” - is far more dependent on us than we are on them. Medvedev himself has worked hard to make that the case. It isn’t just the oligarchs and their vacation homes that would be affected by pinching off Russia’s access to European markets; the average citizen would feel it, too.

    There is actually a lot we can do to punish Russia for violating the laws of war, without having to resort to war to do it.

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  8. Lee

    Mitt Romney really was the broccoli this nation needed to eat. Unfortunately we chose the candy and have been washing it down with Jack Daniels ever since.

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      Saied

      Spot on. Not to mention a few trips to the gym and avoiding money for nothing…

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      Gene Godbold

      That was almost a (PJ) O'Rourkian observation. Nice job.

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      1. Teddy41

        High praise indeed...

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    3. Teddy41

      I totally disagree with the idea that washing anything down with Jack Daniels could be construed as negative. Nectar of the Gods, baby.

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