Ukraine-Russia: are both sides readying for nuclear war?

Vladimir Putin has signalled that Russia is ready to start a nuclear war after Ukraine fired Western weapons at Russia for the first time.

Hours after Joe Biden finally relented and allowed Kyiv to strike inside Russia with US-supplied weapons, his Russian counterpart "signed into law a nuclear doctrine that lowered the threshold" to use its massive arsenal of atomic weapons, said The Telegraph.

Russia has been warning the West for months that any Ukrainian attack with Western-made weapons would be considered direct involvement by Nato in the war in Ukraine and trigger a response. Now, the updated nuclear doctrine states that if Russia's "territorial integrity" is threatened or if it is attacked by a non-nuclear armed nation – i.e. Ukraine – supported by a nuclear power, such as the US or Britain, it can retaliate with nuclear weapons.

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What did the commentators say?

In theory, Putin could now "reach for the red button", said Sky News' Moscow correspondent Ivor Bennett, seeing as the US missiles fired by Ukraine "meet the new criteria" of the Russian nuclear doctrine.

But there are "compelling reasons" why he won't. Russia's main ally, China, "won't tolerate it". More importantly, Putin is "unlikely to risk incurring the wrath" of the incoming US administration. Donald Trump has already indicated he will pursue a "swift conclusion" to the war, which would "likely be in Russia's favour".

"Launching a nuclear weapon now would almost certainly derail that," said Bennett. But there is always a chance that Russia "could do the unthinkable" when, in reality, "few predicted" its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Nevertheless, it was "telling that the reaction in Washington on Tuesday was just short of a yawn", said The New York Times. "Officials dismissed the doctrine as the nothingburger of nuclear threats," wrote David E. Sanger, an American nuclear strategy expert. The Ukraine war has "inured Washington and the world to the renewed use of nuclear weapons as the ultimate bargaining chip".

"This is a signalling exercise, trying to scare audiences in Europe – and to a lesser extent, the United States – into falling off support for Ukraine," said Matthew Bunn, a Harvard professor who has tracked nuclear risks for decades and argues that the probability of Russia using nuclear weapons in the short term "hasn't increased".

The new doctrine is the latest attempt to "turn the world’s largest nuclear arsenal into something the world might actually fear again", said Sanger, giving Putin "the global influence that his gas-and-war-economy so far cannot".

That said, Ukraine's attacks could prompt the Kremlin to think Washington had encouraged them specifically to weaken Russia's nuclear deterrent, said James Acton, co-director of the nuclear policy programme at the Carnegie Endowment.

"If Moscow believes that Washington could conduct a successful preemptive attack on its nuclear forces, its trigger finger could get very itchy," said Acton, quoted in The Associated Press. Russia might "launch a large-scale nuclear attack based on a false or misinterpreted warning".

And if it does, could Ukraine retaliate? That question was raised "a little insincerely" by Volodymyr Zelenskyy recently, said James Snell, senior advisor at the New Lines Institute for Strategy and Policy, in The Spectator. The Ukrainian president mused that, without Nato membership, Ukraine would have to "look for protection of another kind: nuclear arms".

Every Ukrainian agrees that giving up its "significant stockpile" of nuclear weapons after the Soviet Union fell was a mistake. It only joined nuclear non-proliferation treaties in return for a guarantee of its independence. It gave up its deterrent "and got invaded anyway – twice".

But the science of building a rudimentary nuclear bomb is 80 years old; nuclear programmes have been built by "poor and isolated countries" in the past – look at North Korea. It's "technically possible" for Ukraine to do so.

But it likely wouldn't make a difference. Countries with a nuclear arsenal "are attacked and lose wars all the time", and for all his "dark humour", Zelenskyy "would rather have a defence pact than a bomb". That said, "his country traded one for the other", last time "and ended up with neither".

What next?

The attack on Russia's ammunition dump near Bryansk, which US officials believe holds munitions that the newly arrived North Korean soldiers need for their weapons, is a signal that the West wants "escalation", Russia's foreign minister told the G20 summit.

Russia still has the world's biggest nuclear arsenal, and its diplomats say the situation is "comparable to the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis" when Russia and the US came closest to international nuclear war, said Reuters. They claim the West is "making a mistake if it thinks Russia will back down over Ukraine".

But Keir Starmer has promised Russia's "irresponsible rhetoric" on nuclear weapons will not affect support for Ukraine. Speaking at the G20 summit, the prime minister said the UK would "ensure Ukraine has what is needed for as long as needed".