Russian President Vladimir Putin this week approved changes to his country’s nuclear doctrine, formally changing the conditions – and lowering the threshold – under which Russia would consider using its nuclear weapons. Moscow announced Tuesday that Putin had approved changes to the doctrine, officially known as the “Fundamentals of State Policy in the Field of Nuclear Deterrence.” Ukraine launched its first strike deeper into Russia using missiles supplied by the United States.
The updated doctrine states that Russia will treat an attack by a non-nuclear state supported by a country with nuclear capabilities as a joint attack by the two countries. This means that any attack on Russia by a country that is part of a coalition could be considered an attack on the entire group.
Under this doctrine, Russia could theoretically consider any major attack on its territory, even with conventional weapons, by a non-nuclear-armed Ukraine, sufficient to trigger a nuclear response, because Ukraine is backed by the United States. United, armed with nuclear weapons.
Putin has threatened to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine repeatedly since ordering the full-scale invasion of the country on February 24, 2022, and Russia has repeatedly warned the West that if Washington allows Ukraine to fire Western-made missiles deep into on its territory, it would consider the United States and its allies as allies. NATO allies must be directly involved in the war.
US officials said Ukraine fired eight US-made ATACMS missiles in Russia’s Bryansk region early Tuesday, just days after President Biden gave Ukraine permission to fire the weapons deeper into Russian territory. ATACMS are powerful weapons with a maximum range of nearly 190 miles.
“This is the latest example in a long line of nuclear rhetoric and signals emanating from Moscow since the start of this full-scale invasion,” Mariana Budjeryn, a senior research associate at Harvard’s Belfer Center, told the channel. German television broadcaster Deutsche Welle when a change in Russian nuclear doctrine was first proposed last month.
“The previous version of Russian doctrine adopted in 2020 also allowed for a nuclear response to a large-scale conventional attack, but only in extreme circumstances where the very survival of the state was at stake,” Budjeryn noted. “This wording has changed to speak of extreme circumstances that endanger Russia’s sovereignty. Well, what does that actually mean and who defines what serious threats to sovereignty might constitute?”
Budjeryn said Russia had already used weapons capable of carrying a nuclear warhead against Ukraine.
“Russia uses a number of missile launch systems that [can] also come with a nuclear warhead. These are therefore dual capacity systems. For example, the Iskander M short-range ballistic missiles. These were widely used by Russia in this war. So when we receive a missile from Russia to Ukraine and we see that it is an Iskander missile, we do not know whether it is a nuclear or conventional tipped missile.” , said Budjeryn.
Ukrainian parliamentarian Oleksandra Ustinova, who says she helped lobby the Biden administration for authorization for Ukraine to pull ATACMS deeper inside Russia, told CBS News that she did not believe that Putin would actually carry out a nuclear strike.
“He keeps playing and pretending to do something,” Ustinova said. “I’ve said since day one that he’s a bully, and he won’t do that.”
Holly Williams contributed to this report.
