When the United States and its Western allies declared that Ukraine could attack Russian territory with its weapons, President Vladimir V. Putin began to escalate the threats.
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He organized drills to practice the use of tactical nuclear weapons. He said Moscow would consider changing the doctrine that outlines when it would use its nuclear arsenal. He reminded NATO countries in Europe of their small territories and dense populations.
And now the Russian leader has revived a Cold War-era mutual defense pact with North Korea, warning he could arm Kim Jong-un.
“Westerners supply weapons to Ukraine and say that ‘we don’t control anything here at all,’” he said, failing to acknowledge the limits the West has imposed on Ukraine. “We can also say that we give something to someone and then we have no control over anything.”
His ominous warnings, coming at the end of a trip to North Korea and Vietnam, set Russia and the West on a new round of escalation over Ukraine.
“I fear we are in a bad spiral, that policymakers have an illusion of control,” said Alexander Gabuev, director of the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center.
With Western officials more inured to Putin’s threats than during the early days of the war, the Russian leader has turned up the volume, at one point rhetorically asking why Moscow should not “go to the extreme” if the West is seeking their “strategic defeat.”
From the beginning, Putin has used the threat of nuclear war to deter Western nations from supporting Ukraine. Initially, the threat worked. The administration of President Joseph R. Biden Jr. made avoiding nuclear war a key part of its Ukraine policy. The West withheld a full suite of sophisticated weapons from kyiv out of fear that Putin would retaliate against a NATO member state.
But Ukraine’s allies gradually increased the sophistication and range of their weapons deliveries, with HIMARS missile launchers, tanks and F-16 fighter jets. The most recent change — permission for Ukraine to carry out limited strikes against Russia to defend against cross-border attacks — appears to have Putin feeling the pressure.
Putin’s willingness to float the possibility of arming Pyongyang shows the extent to which the war in Ukraine has become a defining principle of his foreign policy.
“Russian foreign policy is now structured around war,” Gabuev said. “In every relationship there are three goals: first, to support the Russian military machine; second, to support the Russian economy under sanctions; and three, how can I instrumentalize this relationship to inflict pain on the United States and its allies for their support of Ukraine?”
A comment Putin made led some analysts to suggest he was considering delivering weapons to the Houthis, the Iranian-backed Shiite militants in Yemen who have been attacking U.S. ships in and around the Red Sea.
Those who doubt Putin’s rhetoric argue that Russia has the upper hand in Ukraine, making it unlikely to do anything that would further mobilize Kiev’s supporters or jeopardize its battlefield record. Former President Donald J. Trump, who has made clear his distaste for American spending in Ukraine, could also return to the White House.
“If Russia is fundamentally confident that the future is better than the past, then the use of nuclear weapons is highly unlikely,” said Nigel Gould-Davies, former UK Ambassador to Belarus.
Still, some analysts worry that Western desensitization to Putin’s warnings has created a precarious situation.
In Moscow, a foreign policy expert who has advised the Kremlin acknowledged that Russia has occasionally cried wolf, “but the wolf never appeared.”
There is a growing sense in Moscow, the person said, that Russia’s threats had not been convincing enough and that the temperature needed to be raised.
Beyond arming U.S. adversaries, including North Korea and Iran, experts in Moscow were exploring the possibility of cyber or space attacks, the person said. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he feared retaliation.
“People criticize Russia and say it is a declining power,” said Bobo Lo, a nonresident fellow at the Lowy Institute in Sydney, Australia, and a former Australian diplomat in Moscow. “But it remains a formidable disruptive power. That is its comparative advantage. Not only does he have the ability, but he also has the will.”
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