Russian President Vladimir Putin has warned that Russia could respond with nuclear weapons if it were attacked with conventional arms in the latest changes to the country’s nuclear doctrine.
In a televised meeting of Russia’s Security Council, Putin announced that under the planned revisions, an attack against the country by a non-nuclear power with the “participation or support of a nuclear power” would be seen as a “joint attack on the Russian Federation”.
Putin emphasised that Russia could use nuclear weapons in response to a conventional attack that posed a “critical threat to our sovereignty”, a vague formulation that leaves broad room for interpretation.
The Russian president is the primary decision-maker on Russia’s nuclear arsenal and needs to give his final approval to the text.
The change appears to significantly lower the threshold for Russia to use atomic weapons and comes as Ukraine’s Western allies consider whether to allow Kyiv to use longer-range weapons to strike military targets deep inside Russia, and a month after Kyiv launched a surprise incursion into Russia’s Kursk region.
Putin did not refer to Ukraine directly, but said the revisions to the doctrine were necessary in view of a swiftly changing global landscape that had created new threats and risks for Russia.
Russia is making slow but incremental gains in Ukraine since it launched its full-scale invasion of the country two and a half years ago and is trying to dissuade Kyiv’s Western allies from strengthening their support.
Putin has made several implicit threats of nuclear attack since launching his war and has suspended Russian participation in the the New START treaty with the US, which limits the number of nuclear warheads each side can deploy.
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