Russia’s Vladimir Putin, under pressure over Ukraine war, turns to familiar escalation playbook

Confronted by serious battlefield losses in Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin did what he has often done before when facing setbacks: doubled down. In a nationally televised speech early Wednesday, an angry-sounding Mr. Putin said he would call up 300,000 reservists to bolster the war effort and hinted he would consider a nuclear strike, saying he would use “all the instruments at his disposal” to prevail. In recent weeks, invading Russian forces—retreating in the face of a determined Ukrainian advance—have been forced to abandon thousands of square miles of hard-won occupied territory, leaving behind large amounts of heavy weaponry. The result: Mr. Putin is facing what is arguably the biggest test of his political life in a struggle that he has sought to define as existential for Russia’s future. He has reacted, as he has throughout his 22-year rule of Russia, by depicting himself as a risk-taker who beats opponents by upping the ante in confrontations.

“Escalation is the norm in our system,” said Gleb Pavlovsky, a Russian political consultant who formerly advised the Kremlin. “The Kremlin doesn’t know what’s coming either. They improvised and are now waiting for a reaction.” Mr. Putin’s setbacks haven’t been limited to the battlefield. His economic campaign against Europe—aimed at undermining support for Kyiv by reducing natural-gas supplies—hasn’t caused the fissures he had hoped. Instead, international opposition to his moves is growing. Last week, Mr. Putin publicly acknowledged that China, which declared before the war that its partnership with Moscow had “no limits,” now had questions and concerns about the conflict. The prime minister of India, a country long friendly with Russia, told Mr. Putin: “Today’s era is not one for war.” Mr. Putin’s mobilization order, Moscow’s first since World War II, is a measure of the damage inflicted on Russia’s military in the course of a seven-month campaign that Russian officials expected to be over in days. Even before the recent lightning advance that recaptured the Kharkiv region for Ukraine, strikes targeting military installations on the Russian-occupied Crimean Peninsula caused beachgoers to scatter and prompted questions from staunch pro-Kremlin commentators.