RUSSIA – PARIS: Russia’s new nuclear doctrine reflects its hopes to deter Ukraine’s allies from a greater role in the war by establishing red lines hedged with added ambiguity, experts say. Moscow warned on Tuesday (Nov 19) that it would respond after Ukraine fired longer-range US missiles at its territory for the first time, as President Vladimir Putin issued a nuclear threat on the 1,000th day of the war. Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said the attack showed Western countries wanted to “escalate” the conflict. Putin signed a decree on Tuesday lowering the threshold for using nuclear weapons, a move that the White House, UK and European Union condemned as “irresponsible”.

Washington this week said it had cleared Ukraine to use ATACMS against military targets inside Russia – a long-standing Ukrainian request. The missile attack would have been “impossible without the direct involvement of Americans”, as well as the French or the British with their Scalp/Storm Shadow missiles, said Russian military analyst Vassily Kashin. “From the Russian perspective, this use is equivalent to an attack by them on Russian territory,” he told AFP. Such weapons had already been used in Crimea and the Donbas regions which, Kashin said, the Kremlin considers to be Russian territory, but the international community does not.

Putin, who began issuing nuclear threats shortly after invading Ukraine in 2022, may want to add credibility to the repeated warnings. According to the Telegram channel Rybar, close to the Russian military, “Russia’s latest warnings, like its red lines, are taken less and less seriously. In the face of this, the adversary is reducing Russia’s room for manoeuvre”. (CNA)

Photo: In this pool photograph distributed by the Russian state agency Sputnik, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin meets with Russian First Deputy Prime Minister Denis Manturov. (AFP)