Russian President Vladimir Putin has announced imminent changes to the country’s nuclear doctrine. Those changes, announced in public comments at the start of a Security Council meeting on September 25, amount to a lowering of the threshold for the use of nuclear weapons.
The specific wording of the new version of the doctrine will only be known once the corresponding decree is published, but Putin listed the main innovations in his short speech. The first proposal is that aggression against Russia by any non-nuclear state, but “with the participation or support” of a nuclear one, should be considered a joint attack. The second defines the conditions for the possible use of nuclear weapons: Moscow will be prepared to use them “upon receipt of reliable information of a massive launch of air and space attack weapons and their crossing of the state border,” including strategic and tactical aircraft, cruise missiles, drones, and hypersonic aircraft.
Finally, nuclear weapons may be used in response to an attack on Russia and Belarus using conventional weapons if that attack poses a “critical threat to sovereignty.” Under the current version of Russia’s nuclear deterrence policy, approved by Putin in June 2020—just four years ago, but in a very different pre-war era—Moscow is only prepared to use nuclear weapons in response to an attack using conventional weapons specifically against the Russian Federation, and only in cases “when the very existence of the state is threatened.”
It was no coincidence that Putin made his comments on the eve of a meeting between U.S. President Joe Biden and his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky, where a decision was due to be made on allowing Kyiv to use Western missiles to strike deep into Russian territory. That conversation is just the latest episode in an extremely worrying trend for the Kremlin in which the West is expanding its aid for Ukraine while showing increasing disregard for Russia’s red lines. In response, the Russian leadership wants to show that its statements should be taken more seriously, and a tougher nuclear doctrine is one of the few tools available to do that. There’s no guarantee that this step will help, however.
Only a couple of years ago, it was hard to imagine Western military personnel ever bombing the headquarters of the Russian Black Sea Fleet, or that such an event could possibly take place without sparking a war between Russia and NATO. Yet that is precisely what happened one year ago, when the Ukrainian armed forces launched a strike on Sevastopol using British Storm Shadow missiles. Flight missions for these missiles, as Putin himself stated, could only have been assigned by NATO military personnel. A leaked conversation, apparently between German air force officers discussing the reasons for Berlin’s refusal to supply Kyiv with long-range Taurus missiles, revealed similar concerns.
But those strikes against Sevastopol did happen, and now the Russian leadership is ramping up its rhetoric in an attempt to stop the West from allowing Ukraine to fire NATO missiles into internationally recognized Russian territory. According to Putin, such permission would mean that “NATO countries, the United States, and European countries are fighting Russia.” In other words, even the president indirectly recognizes the difference between legally established Russian territory and territory captured from Ukraine, including Crimea. That recognition—a position that if publicly voiced in Russia by anyone else would carry the risk of a prison sentence for discrediting the army—is compelling evidence that while NATO is successfully deterring Russia, Russia is not so successful at deterring NATO.
The problem is that right from the very beginning of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Putin—who had envisaged that it would all be over in a matter of days—has deployed extremely harsh threats against the West. “Russia will respond immediately, and the consequences will be such as you have never seen in your entire history,” he said in his address on February 24, 2022, as the invasion began. At first, Western leaders took him at his word, but it soon became clear that Putin would not achieve his maximal goals in Ukraine and that the Ukrainians, with Western help, could rout Russia on the battlefield and force it to retreat.
Washington then began to test the red lines that Moscow had initially proclaimed. Russia continued to threaten the West with a high price for intervention in the war, but in practice there was little it could do about Western aid to Kyiv, which over the two-and-a-half years of war has grown from modest supplies of small arms and Javelin anti-tank missiles to multibillion-dollar packages that include artillery, air defense, tanks, and F-16 fighters.
The West is trying to nudge Russia’s red lines as carefully as possible, via long discussions, media appearances, and communication with Moscow through intelligence channels. This approach irritates Kyiv, but it reduces the risk of an emotional response from Putin. After all, the pyramid of U.S. interests is topped by the security of the United States itself, followed by the security of its formal allies, and only then the interests of friends and partners, which right now include Ukraine.
Washington also believes that unless the Kremlin finds itself on the brink of military defeat in Ukraine, the risk of the use of nuclear weapons remains low. But it is still doing what it can to avoid getting into dangerous situations. Despite Ukrainian drone attacks on the Kremlin and Russian radar stations, which are elements of its nuclear shield, the White House has no intention of changing its cautious approach.
In other words, the nuclear shield has insured Russia against NATO’s large-scale involvement in the war, but below that threshold the West is doing more and more to support its Ukrainian allies. The war has shown that Russia does not have a sufficient arsenal of high-precision conventional weapons to mitigate many of the threats to it, or to break the resistance of a country as large as Ukraine. The Kremlin therefore faces the difficult question of how to restore the effectiveness of Russia’s deterrent.
The upcoming changes to the nuclear doctrine are intended to be part of Russia’s response. But the changes announced by the president, although verbally lowering the threshold for nuclear use, leave the Kremlin with plenty of room for maneuver and interpretation.
As a result, the most likely scenario for the ongoing war is not a nuclear attack, but increasingly large-scale attacks by Russia and Ukraine against each other with drones and missiles. The latter will be a growing problem for Russia, since Kyiv is actively developing its missile program with the help of Western countries. Ukrainian ballistics could become a much more serious threat as early as next year. As for deterrence and retaliation against the West, the Kremlin is likely to double down on using its toolkit of sabotage, arson, and targeted killings on NATO territory. The transfer of sophisticated Russian weapons to Western adversaries, such as the Houthis in Yemen, is another option on the escalation ladder—but such a bold move will come with its own cost, including pushback from partners vital for the Kremlin’s war economy, such as Saudi Arabia.
The irony is that the supposed threats from Ukraine that Putin used to justify the upcoming invasion at the end of 2021 were at the time purely hypothetical and scarcely believable. Yet during the course of the war, many of them have become reality, like self-fulfilling prophecies. By attacking Ukraine, Putin himself created a problem that did not exist before. It’s a problem that will haunt the Kremlin in a multitude of ways for many years to come.
