The Paradox of Victory: When Winning in Ukraine Raises the Nuclear Stakes

In 2022, Jeremy Shapiro warned in “We Are on a Path to Nuclear War” that the war between Russia and Ukraine was heading toward nuclear escalation. Four years into the war, we asked him to revisit that argument.Image: Vyacheslav Argenberg via Wikimedia CommonsIn your original piece, you named nuclear escalation as “the path that we are currently on.” Instead, the past few years have brought several rounds of stalled negotiations and, more recently, a near-frozen front line. What has kept nuclear escalation in check over the last year?We are still on that path. As the piece noted, “It is likely that if the war simply bogs down into a war of attrition, that will not be enough to get to nuclear use. Instead, escalation to nuclear weapons will require one side to feel that it is losing and that a military defeat will have catastrophic consequences for their regime and the personal safety of its leadership.” In the fall of 2022, it seemed that Russia might reach that point, but it managed to rally its forces and turn the tide.Since then, all sides have escalated considerably in a variety of different ways, but apparently, as Russia has not again been on the brink of defeat, they have not seriously reconsidered nuclear use. But they have also not moved much closer to any sort of compromise, settlement, or ceasefire. So if Ukrainian and Western plans to roll back the Russians in eastern Ukraine and Crimea somehow come to fruition, we would again be on the brink of a nuclear exchange. With front lines moving at a glacial pace, that is a much more distant possibility than in late 2022, so I feel more at ease than I did then about the possibility of nuclear escalation (even as the war remains a