It would appear that Vladimir Putin isn’t quite as sick or injured as some have recently speculated. He was at least well enough to attend a summit in Kyrgyzstan with the leaders of some of Russia’s former Soviet allies. While he was there, he delivered some disturbing remarks, suggesting that the Kremlin is “considering” employing a preemptive military strike strategy developed by the United States. In theory, Russia could hit an adversarial nation with a significant number of hypersonic missiles in a matter of hours, destroying that country’s strategic response and command capabilities before they have a chance to fire back. The White House described Putin’s remarks as “saber rattling,” but it’s not entirely clear whether Putin was being serious or just trying to get a rise out of us. (Associated Press)

Russian President Vladimir Putin said Friday that Moscow could adopt what he described as a U.S. concept of using preemptive military strikes, noting it has the weapons to do the job, in a blunt statement amid rising Russia-NATO tensions over Ukraine.

“We are just thinking about it. They weren’t shy to openly talk about it during the past years,” Putin said, referring to the U.S. policy, as he attended a summit in Kyrgyzstan of a Moscow-dominated economic alliance of ex-Soviet nations.

For years, the Kremlin has expressed concern about U.S. efforts to develop the so-called Conventional Prompt Global Strike capability that envisions hitting an adversary’s strategic targets with precision-guided conventional weapons anywhere in the world within one hour.

What Putin is talking about is the conventional Prompt Global Strike (PGS) plan. The United States first began looking at the concept in the early 2000s under George W. Bush. But the President eventually abandoned the plan, citing the risk of massive escalation and our lack of hypersonic missiles to pull it off. If we launch an ICBM from an American submarine, the Russians have no way of immediately knowing if it’s carrying a conventional warhead or a nuke. So the fear is that they would respond with a nuke of their own.

The PGS concept was revived under Barack Obama roughly a decade ago, but it remained only a theory rather than a fleshed-out strategy that we were ready to deploy. The problem is that our hypersonic missile development program has hit many delays and we’re currently falling behind Russia in that race.

It’s worth noting that at no point in Putin’s remarks did he mention using such a plan against Ukraine. And why would he? Russia is already hitting every infrastructure target it can reach in that country on a daily basis. So he could have been referring to any of his NATO adversaries, including the United States.

But how serious was he? Reporters described him as having “a thin smile” while he spoke of potential preemptive strikes. You can watch his opening remarks here with subtitles. Putin spoke of the danger of conflict escalating, blaming the situation on “western elites” who have a “desire for dominance.” But he seemed to go out of his way to stress that the first strike theory was a creation of the United States. It came across as more of a poke in the ribs to the White House than an actual threat of an attack. ‘You’re the ones who came up with the idea. What’s good for the goose, etc.’

I don’t think anyone should be losing too much sleep over this. As we’ve discussed here previously, Russia’s army is in terrible shape and they’re running low on equipment. They’re still having trouble holding even with the Ukrainian forces. It’s inconceivable that Putin would want to open up another front in the war at this point unless he’s seriously willing to break out his nukes. And that’s a prospect I’d prefer not to think about on a Sunday morning.