Eager to make this choice more difficult, the Kremlin leans heavily toward the narrative that the president risks escalation. Last week, it conducted a series of drills on how to move and use its vast arsenal of tactical nuclear weapons.
After Stoltenberg’s statement to The Economist, top Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that “NATO is playing with military rhetoric and going into military euphoria” and that the Russian military knows how to respond. . Asked whether the Western alliance was close to a direct confrontation with Russia, he said: “They are not close; they are working on it.” They are in it.
U.S. officials increasingly view such warnings as hollow. They note that Russia has never risked attacking Poland or other parts of NATO territory supplying weapons to Ukraine. President Vladimir V. Putin has gone to great lengths to avoid direct conflict with the Western alliance, even as he simultaneously flaunts his nuclear capabilities or, as Peskov often does, warns that the West is faced with turning the regional conflict into a third Risk of World War II.
“Putin is wielding the nuclear knife to prevent Biden from letting the United States use weapons to fight back,” Joseph S. Nye, a former U.S. military official and chairman of the National Intelligence Council, said on Tuesday. Nye, an emeritus professor at Harvard University, pointed out, “What is happening now is a nuclear bargaining game and a credibility game.”
He added: “Putin has more at stake in this and will push hard to get Biden to pivot first.”
That has been the case since day one of the war, when Putin put nuclear forces on alert to prevent NATO from helping Ukraine after an invasion. But Biden aides appeared increasingly uninterested in the Russian president’s statements after Putin repeatedly threatened that he might use nuclear weapons.
