Russian President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday warned that Russia was changing its rules towards nuclear weapons, effectively lowering the threshold at which it might use them.
This new threat comes after Putin threatened that if the US and UK agreed to loosen restrictions on long-range strikes into Russia, it would be seen as an act of aggression signifying the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s (NATO) countries were “at war.”
Putin’s threat came as an apparent effort to scare the United States and its allies at a time when Ukraine is pressuring NATO members to allow it to use their long-range missiles for strikes deep inside Russian territory.
Putin recently outlined the approaches to a new edition of the Fundamentals of State Policy on nuclear weapons use, deputy head of the National Security Council Dmitry Medvedev wrote on Telegram on Wednesday.
He said an attack that poses a “critical threat” to the sovereignty of Russia, if carried by a non-nuclear power with the “participation or support of a nuclear power” would be considered a “joint attack on the Russian Federation.”
“A massive launch and crossing of our border with enemy aerospace weapons, including aircraft, missiles and UAVs, can under certain conditions become the basis for the use of nuclear weapons,” Medvedev wrote.
“Aggression against Russia by a non-nuclear-weapon state, but with the support or participation of a nuclear-weapon country, will be considered a joint attack,” Medvedev added.
These threat profiles are exactly tailored to describe Ukraine, which gave up nuclear weapons in 1994, but is supported by nuclear-armed states the United Kingdom, France and the United States, and which has been forbidden to use Western-supplied weapons to attack deep inside Russia.
Amid the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war, tensions between NATO countries and the Kremlin have continued as NATO leaders have increasingly warned that direct conflict with Moscow is a realistic danger as it has more nuclear warheads than any other country, according to the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICANW).
This comes after Putin and senior Russian officials have repeatedly threatened nuclear escalation against Kyiv and its Western partners since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, considered to be close to Putin, issued a new nuclear warning during the United Nations (U.N.) General Assembly on Saturday, as he told Washington, D.C., to prepare Europe for a “suicide venture.”
Lavrov warned the U.S. as well as the U.K. to prepare for a “suicide venture” pointing out the “pointlessness and danger of the very idea to fight to victory with a nuclear power like Russia.”
“A goal has been declared to inflict a strategic defeat on Russia – almost like London and Washington planned in May 1945 as they developed ‘Operation Unthinkable’ on destruction of the Soviet Union even before the end of World War II,” Lavrov said. “Back then, it was a closely held secret. The Anglo-Saxon strategists of today, however, make no secret of their intentions. So far, they expect to defeat Russia with the hands of the illegitimate neo-Nazi Kiev regime, but they already prepare Europe to leap into a suicide venture as well.”
Putin has already said that the use of those weapons would put Russia at war with NATO.
After his and Lavrov’s threats, it is time for the UN to take them seriously and prevent them from taking action.