Last week, President Vladimir Putin announced a plan to change Russia’s nuclear doctrine. He said Russia would be prepared to use a nuclear weapon in response to an attack with conventional weapons that creates a “critical threat to our sovereignty” and would treat “aggression against Russia by any nonnuclear state, but with the participation or support of a nuclear state,” as a “joint attack on the Russian Federation.”
This is the key change, and it’s not subtle. Nor is it meant to be. Its purpose is to influence Washington on the specific question of whether to grant Ukraine’s request to use American weapons systems against targets inside Russia, and more generally to persuade Western leaders to take Mr. Putin’s threats more seriously. His problem is that he is unable to describe situations, however belligerent his rhetoric, in which using nuclear weapons would make sense.
Since Russia annexed Crimea, in 2014, Mr. Putin has been signaling to NATO countries that they risk nuclear war if they interfere on the side of Ukraine. Whether in the form of blustery propaganda, somber announcements or drills, these signals have consistently been designed to exude menace without ever quite committing to nuclear use.
When Mr. Putin announced the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, he warned that those standing “in our way” must know “that Russia will respond immediately, and the consequences will be such as you have never seen in your entire history.” In September 2022 (when U.S. officials were particularly worried about nuclear escalation) he said, “If the territorial integrity of our country is threatened, we will certainly use all the means at our disposal to protect Russia and our people. This is not a bluff.”
On Sept. 13, he said that if NATO countries enable Ukraine to use long-range “precision weapons” to hit targets inside Russia, they would be “at war with Russia.” As a consequence, he said, “bearing in mind the change in the essence of the conflict, we will make appropriate decisions in response to the threats that will be posed to us.” We are left to infer what he means by “appropriate.”
Each of these statements at different times was designed to deter NATO countries from certain actions — Sweden and Finland joining NATO, the West supplying weapons to Ukraine — without committing to any specific course of action if those actions went ahead. But as we know, Sweden and Finland joined NATO, and Europe and the United States have supplied rocket launchers, tanks, F-16 fighter jets and long-range missiles to Ukraine. There was no nuclear response.
