Vladimir Putin could resume nuclear tests in Russia to demonstrate intent if aggravated further, analysts say.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer and US President Joe Biden met in Washington on Friday to hold talks on allowing Kyiv to use long-range missiles against targets in Russia.
On Thursday, Putin warned that the West would be ‘at war’ with Russia if it allowed Ukraine to use its missiles on his soil.
Putin told state television: ‘This would in a very significant way change the very nature of the conflict.’
‘It would mean that NATO countries, the US, European countries, are at war with Russia.’
In June, the Russian president suggested that he could arm the West’s enemies with weapons to strike Western targets abroad or deploy conventional missiles within striking distance of the US and its European allies.
Ulrich Kuehn, an arms expert at the Institute for Peace Research and Security Policy in Hamburg, said he did not rule out Putin sending some kind of nuclear message -such as testing a nuclear weapon to cow the West.
‘This would be a dramatic escalation of the conflict,’ he told Reuters.
‘Because the point is, what kind of arrows has Mr Putin then left to shoot if the West then still continues, apart from actual nuclear use?”
Nuclear tests have not been conducted on Russian soil since 1990, the year before the collapse of the Soviet Union.
‘Nuclear testing would be new. I would not exclude that, and it would be in line with Russia shattering a number of international security arrangements that it has signed up to over the decades during the last couple of years,’ said Kuehn.
Gerhard Mangott, a security specialist at the University of Innsbruck in Austria, also thought it was possible, though unlikely, that Russia’s response could include nuclear attacks.
‘The Russians could conduct a nuclear test,’ Mangott said.
‘They have made all the preparations needed. They could explode a tactical nuclear weapon somewhere in the east of the country just to demonstrate that [they] mean it when they say we will eventually resort to nuclear weapons.’
Russia’s UN ambassador Vassily Nebenzia told the UN Security Council on Friday that NATO would ‘be a direct party to hostilities against a nuclear power,’ if it allowed Ukraine to use longer-range weapons against Russia.
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‘You shouldn’t forget about this and think about the consequences,” he said.
Russia, the world’s largest nuclear power, is also in the process of revising its nuclear doctrine – the circumstances in which Moscow would use nuclear weapons.
