On Thursday, a senior confidant of President Vladimir Putin, Dmitry Medvedev, warned that any Ukrainian attacks on missile launch sites within Russia using armaments supplied by the US and its allies would result in a nuclear reaction from Moscow.
Former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, currently the deputy chairman of Russia’s Security Council, stated that some Ukrainian military leaders were considering using Western-supplied long-range missiles to attack missile launch facilities within Russia.
He did not name the commanders or provide any specifics about the purported scheme, and Ukraine did not respond immediately to his ultimatum.
“What does this mean? It means only one thing – they risk running into the action of paragraph 19 of the fundamentals of Russia’s state policy in the field of nuclear deterrence,” Medvedev wrote on the Telegram messaging app.
“This is something that should be remembered,” Medvedev stated.
The following conditions would lead a Russian president to consider using a nuclear weapon, according to paragraph nineteen of Russia’s 2020 nuclear doctrine: generally in response to an attack using nuclear or other weapons of mass destruction, or to the use of conventional weapons against Russia “when the very existence of the state is put under threat.”
Point “g” of paragraph nineteen, which deals with the nuclear reaction to a conventional weapons assault, was specifically mentioned by Medvedev.
Medvedev’s hawkish stance: Nuclear warnings or strategic ploy
When it comes to Russia’s enormous nuclear weapons, Putin is the decision-maker, but diplomats say Medvedev’s views indicate hawkish thinking at the top of the Kremlin, which has presented the war as an existential struggle with the West.
Some Kremlin critics have discounted some of Medvedev’s previous nuclear warnings as a ploy to get attention or prevent the West from supplying Ukraine with more weaponry. The US and its allies have offered roughly $250 billion in military and other assistance to Kiev.
Since Russia dispatched thousands of troops into Ukraine in February 2022, the threat of nuclear escalation has lingered over the conflict.
Washington feared a Russian nuclear escalation in late 2022, and White House national security advisor Jake Sullivan expressed worries to Moscow that year about any steps toward the use of a nuclear bomb.
According to the Federation of American Scientists, Russia and the United States are by far the world’s two nuclear powers: Putin controls 5,889 nuclear weapons, while US President Joe Biden controls around 5,244 nuclear warheads.
Medvedev portrayed himself as a liberal modernizer during his presidency from 2008 to 2012, but he now presents himself as one of the Kremlin’s most fervent anti-Western hawks.