The Kremlin, eager to make the election more difficult, has leaned heavily on the narrative that the president risks escalation. Last week he conducted a series of exercises on how to move and use his large arsenal of tactical nuclear weapons.
After Stoltenberg’s statement to The Economist, the Kremlin’s chief spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, said that “NATO is flirting with military rhetoric and falling into military ecstasy” and that the Russian military knew how to respond. Asked if the Western alliance was moving closer to a direct confrontation with Russia, he said: “They are not getting closer; They are in it.”
U.S. officials increasingly dismiss these warnings as empty. Russia, they point out, has never taken the risk of attacking Ukraine’s arms supply in Poland or anywhere else on NATO territory. President Vladimir V. Putin has done everything possible to avoid a direct conflict with the Western alliance, even as he flaunted his nuclear capabilities or warned, as Peskov regularly does, that the West risked turning a regional conflict into The third world war.
“Putin is waving the nuclear saber to prevent Biden from allowing American weapons to be used to fight back,” Joseph S. Nye, a former U.S. military officer and head of the National Intelligence Council, said Tuesday. Nye, a professor emeritus at Harvard, noted that “what is happening is a nuclear negotiation game and a credibility game.”
“Putin has the most at stake here and will push hard for Biden to make a sharp turn first,” he added.
This has been true since the early days of the war, when Putin ordered nuclear forces put on alert in an effort to prevent NATO from helping Ukraine after the invasion. But after repeated threats from Putin that he might use nuclear weapons, Biden’s advisers appear increasingly unimpressed by the Russian president’s remarks.