Abstract Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, public references to nuclear weapons within Russia have surged. A key moment came in June 2023, when foreign policy commentator Sergey Karaganov published an article advocating a lower nuclear threshold and, if necessary, preemptive nuclear strikes against European targets. The article sparked controversy and calls to revise Russia’s nuclear doctrine. Although President Putin initially rejected such proposals, by November 2024, Russia adopted a revised doctrine reflecting elements of this debate. This article analyzes the shift as a case of foreign policy co-production involving domestic policy entrepreneurs both inside and outside the Russian state. We argue that bureaucratic insiders leveraged the efforts of outsiders to highlight the failures of Russia’s deterrence posture and bring the issue to the attention of key decision-makers. In turn, these outsiders amplified internal signals and assumed roles useful to both the military bureaucracy and the Kremlin. This dynamic served three functions: it allowed the military to indirectly introduce contentious concepts into the policy-process; it offered the Kremlin insight into elite preferences; and it enabled societal actors to contribute to foreign policymaking under conditions of personalist authoritarianism.
Graef et al. (Tue,) studied this question.