Letter From the Editors

Good military commanders appreciate the value of theatrics. If any army looks sharp enough on the parade ground, one hopes the enemy will back down without a fight; if it seizes the imagination with some bold novelty in combat, the foe may lay down his arms. But how can armies impress a fickle audience in an age of 24/7 instant news saturation?

Well, they can always get some ideas from terrorists. This week, Andrei Serenko reports that agents of the Taliban’s General Directorate of Intelligence have been posing as Islamic State recruiters to lure sympathizers from Russia to Afghanistan. Once there, “they are presented to the media either alive, as foreign IS fighters arrested as part of the Taliban’s successful fight against IS, or dead, as a result of a staged ‘special operation to eliminate’ IS cells in Kabul or other parts of the country,” writes Serenko.

This sort of “propaganda of the deed,” long studied as an element of terror (both state-backed and independent), has reached a sort of renaissance in the Middle East since the gruesome theatrics of the Oct. 7 attacks, and now it is spreading to Lebanon. In an interview with Izvestia, Russian Ambassador to Beirut Aleksandr Rudakov demurs on the question of whether Russia will help investigate the pager explosions that filled up news feeds last week. As a full-on Israeli assault looms, he steps back from the splashy particulars to the moral objection that the Israeli government believes “it is necessary to destroy a certain number of people, and it is completely unimportant whether the real Hezbollah fighters will die or just civilians – women and children. This doesn’t quite fit into the paradigm of the right to self-defense.” As if to illustrate this point, on the same day as the interview, Israel eliminated Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah – as well as the entire residential block where he happened to be.

As fresh horrors unfold to their south, we can understand how the leaders of Ukraine and Russia might feel upstaged, so this week they have engaged in some theatrics of their own.

Putin took the unusual step of publicly broadcasting his appearance at the Russian Security Council’s semiannual nuclear deterrence conference, where he announced changes to the country’s threshold for use of nuclear weapons. This will now include “a massive launch” of conventional weapons into Russia, including “strategic and tactical aircraft, cruise missiles, drones, hypersonic and other aircraft,” he specified.

Commentators were somewhat baffled by the change – Ukraine had arguably already crossed Russia’s red lines in the annexed regions, so why push them up even further? While Republic’s Aleksandr Zhelenin dismisses this as “hot air,” Novaya gazeta Europe’s Leonid Gozman interprets the changes in a more disturbing way: “They indicate that Putin is nervous, that he feels uncertain and is thinking about shuffling the pieces on the board. . . . He is preparing both us and himself for [the nuclear bomb’s] use. We’re moving from ‘that’s impossible’ to ‘when and where.’ ”

According to Ukrainian expert Maksim Yali, Zelensky is also “nervous,” and this is behind the “victory plan” he is shopping on his US visit, which should also not be taken at face value. “This whole plan was designed based on what Ukrainian people want. And the thing they want the most is to defeat Russia,” he explains. At the same time, Yali says, “People in the president’s office are well aware that this ‘victory plan’ is completely unrealistic. But it gives Zelensky an excuse” to lower expectations in an armistice. Yulia Latynina derides this approach in her description of Zelensky’s plan – i.e., “Ukraine’s admission into NATO and a nuclear war between the US and Russia over Chasov Yar” – as “a PR ploy intended to pin Ukraine’s defeat on the damn Yankees.” But if leaders’ drive to upstage one another is such a factor in the escalation of wars, laying the groundwork for peace might also require some theatrics.