“Firstly, the 2020 edition of the doctrine contained no mention of Belarus where we deployed our nuclear weapons and whom we had taken under our ‘nuclear umbrella’,” Litovkin explains. “Secondly, the previous version of the doctrine contained no mention of Russia being authorized to use nuclear weapons if attacked by a non-nuclear state backed by a nuclear power.”
According to him, Russia thus sends a direct warning to the United States and NATO who supply Ukraine with long-range missiles and urge Kiev to use them, effectively waging a war against Russia by proxy.
“This is a serious warning that, if they go too far and long-range missiles are used against Russian territory – and these long-range missiles are programmed by NATO specialists because Ukrainian specialists lack the necessary equipment and expertise, not to mention NATO aircraft and heavy UAVs guiding these missiles – we would be empowered to strike against the sites these missiles are launched from," he adds.
Dmitry Stefanovich from the Moscow-based Institute of World Economy and International Relations at the Russian Academy of Sciences also points out that the new edition of the nuclear doctrine states that nuclear weapons could be used in case of a threat to Russia’s “territorial integrity and sovereignty” rather than in case of a threat to “the country’s very existence” as before.
The doctrine thus serves as a reaction to “global processes in the military-political sphere, not all of which are related to Ukraine,” Stefanovich notes.
“Most importantly, the document still maintains that nuclear deterrence works only until nuclear weapons are used. One can only guess what would happen ‘beyond the nuclear threshold’ and I hope these speculations remain purely hypothetical,” he remarks.