(CNN) – Russian President Vladimir Putin is fond of nuclear saber-rattling: On the eve of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the Kremlin leader presided over the rehearsal of a nuclear strike, and his not-so-veiled nuclear threats have kept US officials on edge ever since.
This week, Putin shook up the arms control world again by unveiling proposed changes to his country’s nuclear doctrine. At a Wednesday meeting of his Security Council, the president said Russia would review doctrine to potentially lower the threshold for the use of nuclear weapons, adding that Moscow would consider an attack by a non-nuclear state that involved or was supported by a nuclear state. nuclear as a “joint attack against the Russian Federation.”
Nuclear retaliation, Putin continued, could be considered “once we receive reliable information about a massive launch of air and space attack weapons and their crossing of our state border. I am referring to strategic and tactical aircraft, cruise missiles, UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles), hypersonics and other aircraft.”
In simple terms, Putin was sending a warning to Washington and other supporters of Ukraine. The doctrine review comes as Ukraine — a non-nuclear weapons state since it renounced claims to nuclear weapons following the collapse of the USSR — pressures the United States for long-range weapons that would allow it to strike deeper inside Russia.
The revamp of the doctrine is clearly intended to make Western policymakers think twice as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky presents his “victory plan” to the Biden administration. By wielding the big stick of Russia’s nuclear arsenal, Putin is hinting that the potential costs of providing Ukraine with such weaponry may be too high for the West.
So does Putin’s statement move the Doomsday Clock closer to midnight? Wednesday’s announcement sparked robust discussion online, with arms control experts trying to interpret Putin’s language on thresholds for nuclear retaliation.
Pavel Podvig, an expert on Russian nuclear forces, wrote in a thread on X that there was “deliberate ambiguity” in the announcement, particularly around what doctrine defines as aggression against Russia.
“In the current version of Russia’s nuclear doctrine, there is no distinction between aggression by a nuclear-armed state and one without,” he wrote. “All you need is aggression that threatens the existence of the state.”
Podvig pointed to an earlier Russian assurance that Moscow would not employ nuclear weapons against non-nuclear-weapon states, with one exception: when that state acts “in association or alliance with a nuclear-weapon state.”
Russia’s new red lines may be difficult to perceive, then, but that may be beside the point.
“The language is designed for the very specific situation we currently find ourselves in,” Podvig wrote. “We know which states are with and without nuclear weapons.”
Mariana Budjeryn, a researcher at the Belfer Center at Harvard Kennedy School, suggested that the red lines may exist primarily in Putin’s mind.
“There are two notable departures from the previous Russian military doctrine of 2020,” he wrote in X. “The 2020 doctrine permitted the use of nuclear weapons in response to conventional aggression that endangers the very existence of the state. This is now relaxed to extreme threats to state sovereignty. What does that mean? Who defines what constitutes these threats? Probably Mr. Putin. Conventional aggression is further specified to include a massive air-space attack. Who defines what constitutes ‘massive’ or massive enough? Probably Mr. Putin.”
The key point of the changes in military doctrine, Budjeryn added, “is less than it seems, but it provides more interpretive room for the Russian leadership to define the circumstances of nuclear use.”
Putin’s very public move also underscores the performative nature of nuclear deterrence.
“The spectacle here is the key: the act of communicating ‘our doctrine is changing’ now has the world’s attention, with the implicit message: they should be worried,” wrote Kristin Ven Bruusgaard in X, director of the Norwegian Intelligence School , whose academic research focuses on Russian nuclear strategy. “The content of Putin’s speech is less spectacular; A number of issues receive more detailed treatment than before, but the granularity of the nuclear thresholds remains as blurred as before, as intended.
It is also uncertain what the current revised doctrine might look like, Ven Bruusgaard added.
“The key question is, what now? Will we see a document, will it contain more than what Putin has stated? Is this a trial balloon or is this the whole point? If so, it is curious that the changes would be so few if one were to go through the process of updating the doctrine.”
Ultimately, it’s also worth remembering that Ukraine has already struck deep inside Russian territory, including drone strikes in the Russian capital and a recent attack that hit a Russian ammunition depot. And the results of Zelensky’s visit to the United States could soon tell us whether anyone in Washington is paying attention to Putin’s nuclear rhetoric.
