The President is playing a game all too familiar to the Russians.
The Kremlin has been bandying about nuclear threats since even before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, with none louder than Dmitry Medvedev, Putin’s clownish sidekick and chief social media warrior.
Last week, Medvedev, who was Russia’s President from 2008 to 2012 and Prime Minister from 2012 to 2020, called the latest US deadline for Moscow to accept ceasefire talks a “step towards war”, and warned Trump that Russia possessed nuclear strike capabilities of last resort.
It was this war of words that prompted Trump to order nuclear submarines closer to Russia. In doing so, he has essentially called Russia’s bluff and may well feel vindicated by the Kremlin’s silence.
The outrage instead came from pro-Kremlin military commentators in the Russian media, with one accusing Trump of “throwing a temper tantrum” while another dismissed the submarine deployment as “meaningless blather”.
But by swatting away Medvedev’s threats, the US President has given him a relevance he rarely enjoys – for all his mouthiness – either at home or abroad.
Hailed by European optimists as a pro-Western reformer when he took over as President from Putin in 2008, Medvedev styled himself as a tech-loving moderniser and defender of civil liberties
In reality, he was never the champion of Russia’s Western-oriented middle class that he pretended to be.
He proved instead to be a mere placeholder while he helped Putin perform a constitutional sleight of hand that reset the clock on his presidency.
Ordinary Russians likened the charade to Gogol’s play The Government Inspector, in which a fraudster impersonates a powerful official only for the real inspector to appear in the final scene. Cynical though it was, most Russians accepted the ruse.
Since Putin’s return, Medvedev has been sidelined, seeking relevance from the periphery by turning himself into an ever more bombastic caricature of his former self – one even Russians struggle to take seriously.
Last year, The Insider, an anti-Kremlin investigative site, reported that Medvedev’s most “unhinged” social media posts often appeared shortly after deliveries from his Tuscan vineyard arrived at his Moscow address.
Alcohol might explain part of his transformation from a Western-courting politician to someone who now denounces Western leaders as a “pack of grunting pigs”.
But it is more likely that he simply craves attention – and Trump has just given it to him, even if the US President describes him as a “failed” has-been.
The real target of the submarine manoeuvre is almost certainly Putin himself – a man Trump admires but has grown frustrated with because of his refusal to make concessions on Ukraine.
Matters are coming to a head, with Trump vowing to impose sanctions on Russia and tariffs on countries buying its energy unless Moscow agrees to a ceasefire by August 8.
So far, Putin has remained unmoved, seemingly calculating that Washington will retreat from secondary tariffs, which would hurt Russia’s energy-dependent economy but also carry significant diplomatic costs for Trump.
With time running out ahead of the real showdown, the submarine move should be seen as an attempt to ratchet up pressure on Putin.
In that light, the Kremlin’s silence looks less like a triumph for the US President than evidence that the Russian leader has not blinked – yet.
