The Kremlin, seeking to complicate the decision, has relied heavily on the narrative that the president risks escalation. Last week it conducted a series of exercises focused on how to move and use its large arsenal of tactical nuclear weapons.
After Mr. Stoltenberg’s statement to The Economist, the Kremlin’s top spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, said that “NATO is flirting with military rhetoric and falling into military ecstasy” and that the Russian military knows how to respond. Asked whether the Western alliance was on the verge of a direct confrontation with Russia, he said: “They are not getting any closer; they are in it.”
American officials are increasingly dismissing such warnings as empty words. Russia never took the risk of attacking arms supplies to Ukraine in Poland or elsewhere on NATO territory. President Vladimir V. Putin has done everything he can to avoid direct conflict with the Western alliance, even as he flaunted his nuclear capabilities or, as Mr. Peskov regularly does, warned that the West risked one turning regional conflict into a third world war.
“Putin is rattling the nuclear saber to stop Biden from using U.S. weapons to counterattack,” Joseph S. Nye, a former American military official and chairman of the National Intelligence Council, said on Tuesday. Mr. Nye, a Harvard professor emeritus, noted: “What is happening here is a nuclear negotiation game and a credibility game.”
“Putin has more at stake in this matter, and he will work hard to get Biden to back down first,” he added.
This has been true since the first days of the war, when Putin ordered nuclear forces to be alerted to prevent NATO from helping Ukraine after the invasion. But after repeated threats from Mr Putin that he might use nuclear weapons, Mr Biden’s advisers appear increasingly less impressed by the Russian president’s statements.
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2024-05-30 17:35:29
www.nytimes.com
