President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday signed a revised nuclear doctrine declaring that a conventional attack on Russia by any nation that is supported by a nuclear power will be considered a joint attack on his country.
Putin’s endorsement of the new nuclear deterrent policy comes on the 1,000th day after he sent troops into Ukraine, on Feb. 24, 2022.
It follows U.S. President Joe Biden’s decision to let Ukraine strike targets inside Russia with U.S.-supplied longer-range missiles.
The signing of the doctrine, which says that any massive aerial attack on Russia could trigger a nuclear response, demonstrates Putin’s readiness to tap the country’s nuclear arsenal to force the West to back down as Moscow presses a slow-moving offensive in Ukraine.
Asked whether the updated doctrine was deliberately issued on the heels of Biden’s decision, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said the document was published “in a timely manner” and that Putin instructed the government to update it earlier this year so that it is “in line with the current situation.”
Putin first announced changes in the nuclear doctrine in September, when he chaired a meeting discussing the proposed revisions.
Russia’s president has previously warned the U.S. and other NATO allies that allowing Ukraine to use Western-supplied longer-range weapons to hit Russian territory would mean that Russia and NATO are at war.
The updated doctrine states that an attack against Russia by a nonnuclear power with the “participation or support of a nuclear power” will be seen as their “joint attack on the Russian Federation.”
It adds that Russia could use nuclear weapons in response to a nuclear strike or a conventional attack posing a “critical threat to sovereignty and territorial integrity” of Russia and its ally Belarus, a vague formulation that leaves broad room for interpretation.
It does not specify whether such an attack would necessarily trigger a nuclear response. It mentions the “uncertainty of scale, time and place of possible use of nuclear deterrent” among the key principles of the nuclear deterrence.
VLADIMIR PUTIN