Wanting to make the choice difficult, the Kremlin has strongly supported its argument that the president is risking escalating tensions. Last week, the Kremlin conducted a series of exercises on how to move and use its vast arsenal of tactical nuclear weapons.
After Stoltenberg spoke to The Economist, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said “NATO is indulging in military rhetoric and military euphoria” and said the Russian military knows how to respond. Asked whether the Western alliance was close to a direct confrontation with Russia, he said: “They are not close, they are already in the middle of one.”
U.S. officials have increasingly dismissed such warnings as unfounded. They point out that Russia has never risked attacking arms supplies to Ukraine in Poland or elsewhere on NATO territory. President Vladimir V. Putin has done all he can to avoid a direct conflict with the Western alliance, even as he flaunts his nuclear capabilities and warns, as Mr. Peskov regularly does, that the West risks tipping a regional conflict into World War III.
“President Putin is threatening nuclear weapons to deter President Biden from using U.S. weapons in retaliation,” Joseph S. Nye, a former U.S. military official and chairman of the National Intelligence Council, said Tuesday. “What’s happening is a nuclear negotiation game, a credibility game.”
“President Putin has a much bigger stake in this one and will likely put a lot of pressure on Biden to make concessions first,” he added.
This has been the case since early in the war, when Putin ordered nuclear forces on alert to prevent NATO from aiding Ukraine after his invasion, but Biden’s aides appear increasingly unimpressed by the Russian president’s declarations as Putin repeatedly threatens to use nuclear weapons.
