Russian President Vladimir Putin set off nuclear alarms last month with his bellicose rhetoric while announcing a series of moves to ramp up his war on Ukraine.
However, military experts say there are also a number of non-nuclear ways that Putin could escalate the war in an attempt to curb battlefield losses.
Putin and his generals have already been accused of carrying out war crimes and even genocide against Ukrainians, but have so far refrained from using weapons of mass destruction.
Here are some of the non-nuclear ways Russia could inflict mass casualties on Ukraine.
Biological weapons
Russia has repeatedly accused the United States of manufacturing biological weapons in Ukraine, though it has offered no proof.
The U.S. has countered with warnings that Russia could be preparing its own chemical or biological attack.
“They are also suggesting that Ukraine has biological and chemical weapons in Ukraine. That’s a clear sign he’s considering using both of those,” Biden said of Putin in March.
Biological weapons are microorganisms such as anthrax, ricin and botulism that are released deliberately to cause disease and death. They are prohibited under various international laws and treaties.
Russia inherited parts of the Soviet biological weapons program, and the State Department assessed this year that it still operates such a program.
Robert Petersen, an analyst at the Center for Biosecurity and Biopreparedness, wrote earlier this month that though there is “no definitive proof of an extant bioweapons program,” public information strongly suggests that Russia has maintained and modernized the Soviet program.
And he said Russia’s war in Ukraine could push the military to address issues like corruption that have stalled advancements in areas such as genetic engineering of biological weapons.
“Most likely, the Russian military is right now searching for weapons that can turn the tide of war on the battlefield in Ukraine and that might also prove useful in a wider war against NATO,” he wrote.
Chemical attacks
If Russia were to launch a chemical or biological attack, it would be relatively easy to confirm, so experts believe they would attempt a “false flag” operation, attempting to make it look like Ukraine attacked its own people in a bid to discredit Russia.
Ben Connable, an adjunct professor of security studies at Georgetown University, wrote for the Atlantic Council that those efforts would likely fail.
“This could still be an effective tactic for the Russian domestic audience, but the days of gaslighting Western leaders and reporters are over. Advanced Western surveillance, detection, and forensics will not allow Russia’s armed forces to secretly deploy chem-bio weapons,” he wrote.
Such an attack would likely harden Ukrainian resolve and further increase Western support for its military, while also posing a risk to any Russian troops attempting a follow-on attack in the area, Connable wrote.
The main forms of chemical weapons are nerve agents, blister agents, choking agents and blood agents — all meant to kill or maim targets.
Putin has been accused of being behind a string of chemical attacks against dissidents and former Russian spies using Novichok, a nerve agent.
Russia has also been involved in chemical attacks in previous conflicts in Chechnya and Syria.
As with biological weapons, Russia has signed — and ignored — international conventions promising to get rid of its chemical arsenal.
Matthew Bunn, a professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School and investigator for the Belfer Center’s Project on Managing the Atom, said Russia might see a chemical attack as a less risky step than a nuclear attack.
“I imagine that NATO and the Biden administration are actively, but privately, messaging various parties to try to deter this from happening,” he said in a Q&A earlier this year.
Destroying dams
Among the options Russia is considering to thwart Ukraine’s offensive in the south is destroying dams on the Dnieper River, according to Branislav Slantchev, a political science professor at the University of California, San Diego, who has written extensively on the war.
The plan would be to destroy two dams upstream from the Dneprostroi Dam, the largest on the major river, which within a day would cause it to collapse.
“This would drown the entire left bank of the Dnipro downstream, and force the Ukrainians to evacuate hundreds of thousands of people instead of advancing on Kherson, not to mention the massive casualties,” Slantchev wrote last month.
“Separately, the uber-hawks are calling for attacks on the dams north of Kyiv. The effects of a collapse along the Dnipro reservoir cascade would be catastrophic since the low-lying neighborhoods in the path of the resulting flood are very densely populated.”
Russia has already hit dams in its strikes on critical infrastructure across the country.
Last month, Russian missiles damaged a major dam in the central Ukrainian city of Kryvyi Rih — Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s home town — flooding the embankments of a Dnieper tributary and forcing more than a hundred homes to be evacuated.
“All the occupiers can do is to sow panic, create an emergency situation, try to leave people without light, heat, water and food,” Zelensky said after the attack. “Can it break us? Not at all. Will they face a fair response and retribution? Definitely yes.”
Conventional warfare
Russia’s barrage of missile strikes this month — on civilian targets, military outposts and energy infrastructure — have shown its ability to escalate the war through conventional means as well.
The war has already killed 6,306 civilians, including 397 children, according to the latest count from the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights.
Putin’s ongoing mobilization of hundreds of thousands of new troops also shows his willingness to increase manpower at the risk of political blowback at home.
The air strikes have had little success in stemming Ukraine’s military gains, showing the limitations of Russia’s air power as the West races to bolster Ukraine’s air defenses.
Still, the missiles are taking their toll, the World Health Organization (WHO) noted in a statement last week.
“The destruction of houses and lack of access to fuel or electricity due to damaged infrastructure could become a matter of life or death if people are unable to heat their homes,” said WHO Regional Director for Europe Hans Henri Kluge.
Putin could also declare a general mobilization that would allow the military to expand its pool of potential conscripts, but that would require declaring the “special military operation” as a war, which he has been loath to do.
Ukrainian military intelligence spokesman Vadym Skibitsky has said such a move could also help Ukraine by further inflaming resistance to the war in Russia.
“Young people in their twenties and thirties are needed on the front. Because of that, this announcement of general mobilization would be an indicator that will show the readiness of the Russian people to continue this bloody war,” he told the Kyiv Post.
