Putin brandishes menacing nuclear weapons as talks with US falter

President Vladimir Putin of Russia gestures that he can’t hear reporters as President Donald Trump looks on after both leaders left their aircraft to meet at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Anchorage, Alaska, on Friday, Aug. 15, 2025. By touting new weapons tests, Moscow is signaling to Washington that it must contend with the Kremlin’s power and negotiate — like it or not. (Doug Mills/The New York Times)

By PAUL SONNE

First came President Donald Trump’s scrapping of a proposed summit in Budapest, Hungary, on the war in Ukraine and his imposition of sanctions on Russia.

Then came the announcements by Russian President Vladimir Putin that Russia had successfully tested two menacing nuclear-capable weapons designed for possible doomsday combat against the United States.

The timing may not have been coincidental, analysts say, and Putin’s point was clear: Given the serious threat of Russia’s nuclear arsenal, the United States will ultimately need to respect Moscow’s power and negotiate — like it or not.

It’s a message the Kremlin has relied on in its brinkmanship with the United States dating to the days of the Cold War, when the Soviet Union regularly emphasized that for the world’s two biggest nuclear powers, negotiation was a necessity, not an option. More recently, Moscow has underscored that attempts to isolate Russia, including with the recent U.S. sanctions on Russian oil producers, were doomed to fail.

“What they are trying to say is you cannot just sanction us in any way you please, we are a major nuclear power and you need to engage in talks,” said András Rácz, a senior fellow at the German Council on Foreign Relations.

Trump returned to the White House early this year determined to broker an end to the war in Ukraine. In the days since, Moscow has tried unsuccessfully to turn those talks into a wider negotiation that would encompass business, energy and nuclear matters, looking to strike a “package deal” that could be more beneficial to the Kremlin.

“The only sector in which Russia is in near parity with the United States is of course weapons of mass destruction,” Rácz said. “So in order to have leverage, they have to include the nuclear question in the package deal. The Soviets did the same. The Soviet economy was incomparable to the scale of the U.S. economy in world trade. The real bargaining chip the Soviets had was their nuclear arsenal.”

So far, the effort by the Kremlin has failed, and Trump has signaled he won’t strike business or energy deals until Moscow ends the war. But nuclear weaponry is one area where Moscow may see an opening to draw in Washington.

In September, Putin proposed that Russia and the United States extend caps on long-range nuclear weapons for a year beginning in February. Trump responded by calling the offer a “good idea.”

This past week, Putin touted his new weapons first unveiled in 2018, which are designed to penetrate U.S. missile defenses. They would ensure that Russia can continue to threaten the United States with mutually assured destruction, regardless of Trump’s plans for an enhanced “Golden Dome” missile defense shield.

Last weekend, Putin described the results of a test Oct. 21 of the Burevestnik, a low-flying, nuclear-propelled Russian cruise missile capable of carrying nuclear warheads. Then, on Wednesday, the Russian leader said Moscow had tested the Poseidon, a long-range, nuclear-powered underwater drone.

The tests may have been planned well before the negative turn in relations between Putin and Trump.

“I don’t think that was linked to any kind of recent political developments,” said Pavel Podvig, an analyst based in Geneva who directs the Russian Nuclear Forces Project. He noted that Putin could have more directly threatened the United States in announcing the test results but did not.

The weapons do not change the strategic balance between the United States and Russia.

“Russia since the mid ’60s has had the ability to destroy the United States with nuclear weapons,” said James M. Acton, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “That vulnerability is a fact not a choice.

“And the fact that Russia is inventing other ways of doing that shouldn’t concern us any more than the basic reality of the nuclear balance always has,” he said.

But the design of the Burevestnik and the Poseidon, which both rely on nuclear reactors for propulsion, is particularly menacing. The Burevestnik has been called a “flying Chernobyl,” a reference to the power plant in Soviet Ukraine that became synonymous with nuclear disaster after a meltdown in 1986. A botched test of the weapon in 2019 off the coast of northern Russia caused nuclear contamination and killed several Russians.

The threat of nuclear contamination may also be designed to prompt Western leaders to engage. “I think this is kind of a madman strategy,” Rácz said. “You start developing really doomsday weapons, and you pretend you are really ready to use them.”

Vladimir M. Dzhabarov, deputy chair of the international affairs committee in Russia’s upper chamber of parliament, said in a state news interview Friday that the tests have shown Western leaders that they must engage with Moscow.

“We demonstrated a desire to sit down and negotiate with the West, to end the confrontation, which had essentially become endless, and to begin to hear and listen to each other,” Dzhabarov said. “Because with a weapon like the Burevestnik in its arsenal, Russia essentially becomes invincible.”

Dzhabarov pointed to the demands the Kremlin had made before invading Ukraine and said that the West, faced with weapons like the Burevestnik, will need to come around to the idea “that maybe it’s time to listen to Russia’s arguments.”

It’s unclear whether Washington got that message. After Putin’s announcements, Trump wrote on social media that the United States would restart nuclear weapons testing “on an equal basis.” The comment started a round of speculation about whether Washington would test its first nuclear warhead explosion since 1992.

But Putin’s announcements this past week were about testing delivery systems for nuclear warheads, not exploding the warheads themselves. Moscow last tested a nuclear warhead in 1990.