The Kremlin, eager to make the choice more difficult, has leaned heavily on the president’s argument that he risks escalation. Last week, it published a Series of exercises How to move and use its vast arsenal of tactical nuclear weapons.
After Stoltenberg’s statement to The Economist, the Kremlin’s chief spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, said that “NATO is playing with military rhetoric and getting into a military euphoria” and that the Russian military knows how to counter it. Asked if the Western alliance was about to enter a direct confrontation with Russia, he said: “They are not approaching, they are already in it.”
American officials increasingly view the warnings as meaningless. Russia, they note, has never risked an attack on Ukraine’s arms supplies in Poland or elsewhere in NATO. President Vladimir V. Putin has done everything he can to avoid a direct conflict with the Western alliance, even as he flaunts his nuclear capabilities or warns the West, as Peskov often does, of the possibility of turning a regional conflict into World War III.
“Putin is wielding the nuclear sword to prevent Biden from allowing American weapons to be used in counterattacks,” Joseph S. Nye, a former U.S. military official and chairman of the National Intelligence Council, said Tuesday. Mr. Nye, a professor emeritus at Harvard University, noted that “what you have going on is a nuclear negotiation game, but also a credibility game.”
He added: “Putin has a lot of skin in the game and he will try to get Biden to change his position first.”
That has been the case since the first day of the war, when Putin put nuclear forces on alert to prevent NATO from helping Ukraine after an invasion. But after Putin repeatedly threatened to use nuclear weapons, Biden’s aides appeared to grow increasingly unimpressed by the Russian president’s pronouncements.
