Don’t go too far with arms support for Ukraine: Putin’s message to the West

President Vladimir Putin’s message to NATO was simple and clear: don’t go too far in providing military support to Ukraine, or you risk a conflict with Russia that could quickly turn nuclear.

As the war in Ukraine slowly turns in Moscow’s favor, Putin has declared that he does not need nuclear weapons to achieve his goals. But he also says it is wrong for the West to assume that Russia will never use them.

Putin said in June that it should not be taken too lightly and superficially, confirming that Russian nuclear doctrine calls for the use of nuclear weapons if the country sees a threat to its sovereignty and territorial integrity.

Moscow’s nuclear message comes as NATO allies are bolstering Ukraine’s exhausted and under-equipped forces, heralding what could become the most dangerous phase of the war.

Exercises, threats and signals

Moscow has held exercises with its tactical, or field, weapons in southern Russia and with ally Belarus, deploying some of the weapons in 2023. Videos from the Russian Defense Ministry showed Iskander missile launchers, nuclear-armed fighter jets and missiles fired from the sea.

The Kremlin described the exercises as a response to Western considerations of sending NATO troops to Ukraine and allowing Kiev to deploy longer-range weapons for limited strikes on Russian territory.

Reliance on nuclear threats and signals is an enduring trend in Russian activities during the war in Ukraine, said Heather Williams, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. Russia’s leadership may believe it has more at stake in Ukraine than NATO does, and nuclear threats are a way to signal its commitment to winning the war in the hopes of deterring Western intervention.

Since the February 24, 2022 invasion, Putin has repeatedly invoked Russia’s nuclear capabilities to deter Western intervention. The United States and NATO have criticized the nuclear saber-rattling but said they have seen no changes in Russia’s nuclear posture that would warrant a response.

After initial setbacks in Ukraine, Putin said Moscow was ready to use any means to protect Russian territory, fueling fears that he could use tactical nuclear weapons to stop Kiev’s advance. Putin later toned down his rhetoric after Ukraine’s 2023 counteroffensive failed to achieve its goals.

Amid Russia’s recent military successes, Putin said Moscow doesn’t need nuclear weapons to win in Ukraine. At the same time, however, he warned that Kiev’s strikes on Russian soil with Western-supplied weapons with longer ranges would be a major escalation because they would involve Western intelligence and military personnel, something the West denies.

Representatives of NATO members, particularly small countries in Europe, need to be aware of what they are playing with, he said, adding that they could be making a mistake if they rely on American protection if Russia attacks them.

Both are part of Russia’s early warning system for detecting intercontinental ballistic missile launches thousands of kilometers (miles) away. Moscow and Washington rely on such systems to track each other’s launches.

Along with previous Ukrainian attacks on Russian bomber bases carrying nuclear weapons, the radar strikes could qualify as triggers for the use of atomic weapons under Moscow’s nuclear doctrine. Russian hawks urged the Kremlin to respond forcefully.

At a June forum in St. Petersburg, Sergei Karaganov, a foreign policy expert with ties to the Kremlin, urged Putin to aim a nuclear weapon at our Western adversaries to achieve victory in Ukraine.

Putin reacted cautiously, saying he saw no security threats that would justify the use of Russia’s nuclear arsenal. At the same time, he indicated that Moscow was considering changes to its nuclear doctrine.

Change of nuclear doctrine

Since the beginning of the war, hawks have been pushing for a revision of the doctrine, which states that Moscow can use nuclear weapons in response to a nuclear or conventional attack that threatens the existence of the Russian state. Some argue that the threshold is too high, giving the West the impression that the Kremlin will never touch its nuclear arsenal.

Foreign policy analyst Dmitry Trenin of the Institute for World Economy and International Relations, a Moscow-based think tank that advises the Kremlin, urged amending the doctrine to state that Russia has the first right to use nuclear weapons when its core national interests are at stake, as in Ukraine.

It is important to convince the ruling elites in the US and in the West as a whole that they cannot remain comfortable and fully protected after provoking a conflict with Russia, Trenin said.

Climbing the ladder of escalation

Now that the West has allowed Ukraine to enter Russian territory, Putin has threatened to respond by supplying weapons to Western adversaries worldwide. He underscored the message in June by signing a mutual defense pact with North Korea, signaling that Moscow could begin arms shipments to Pyongyang.

He also said Moscow would begin producing intermediate-range missiles banned under a Cold War pact that Washington and Moscow scrapped in 2019. The Kremlin declined to say where Moscow might deploy the new weapons, which were banned by the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, which banned ground-launched missiles with ranges of 500 to 5,500 kilometers (310 to 3,410 miles).

Such nuclear-armed missiles are considered particularly destabilizing because they can reach their targets faster than ICBMs, leaving decision-makers with virtually no time to act and increasing the likelihood of a global nuclear war resulting from a false launch warning.

Hawks urged Putin to quickly climb the escalation ladder and force the West to back down.

The battlefield nuclear weapons exercise was one such move, Trenin said, while another could be a nuclear test on Russia’s Arctic Novaya Zemlya archipelago. Putin has left the door open to resuming such tests, which are banned under a global pact Russia signed, though he noted that “there is no need for that yet.

Some Russian military experts said Moscow could impose a no-fly zone over the Black Sea to limit U.S. intelligence flights that help Ukraine strike targets in Russia. In late June, the Defense Department threatened to take unspecified measures against U.S. drones there.

Trenin and other experts said possible escalating steps could include cyberattacks on U.S. and European infrastructure, conventional strikes on Western troops if they go into Ukraine, and attacks on military supply centers for Kiev on the territory of NATO members. U.S. military bases could also be targeted, they said.

Trenin suggested that Russia could take the lead by threatening nuclear strikes on NATO targets in Europe, which would bring the enemy to his senses and force him to join the talks.

Active nuclear deterrence means the ability to use nuclear weapons first in the ongoing conflict, not necessarily on the battlefield and not on the territory of Ukraine, he said. The enemy should have no doubt: Russia will not allow itself to be defeated or blocked from achieving its stated goals by keeping nuclear weapons out of the conflict.