The order for the alerting of nuclear forces given by Vladimir Putin a few days after the start of the war against Ukraine is significant because for the first time Russia refers to such weapons “in a context of offensive warfare, not defensive warfare,” he says in an interview with Adnkronos. Russian analyst at the Vienna Center for Disarmament and Non-Proliferation, Nikolai Sokov. “In all official documents, the use of nuclear weapons is envisaged only in the context of a defense war.”
Putin’s words, adds the analyst, “indicate a completely different situation from the case of an attack on Russia by the United States or NATO” and, therefore, introduce an “element of greater uncertainty” (the use of nuclear weapons, both from Russia and from the United States, is foreseen only in the event that the survival of the country is questioned, a situation that the recent words of the Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, when in an interview with CNN spoke of the use of nuclear weapons in the event that it is an existential threat to Russia, they confirmed, ed).
What creates possible future problems for Russia, the analyst emphasizes, is not a further increase in military forces on the eastern flank of NATO. But an eventual US shift to Europe of conventional long-range systems, cruise missiles, other ships with cruise missiles, or ground-launched hypersonic missiles when they are developed in five or six years. That is to say, the same theater missiles (with a range of 2-3,000 kilometers) developed in recent years by Russia which are however designed for dual use, can be armed with nuclear as well as conventional warheads.
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