For citation, please use:
Bogdanov, K.V., 2025. Do Not Invite Disaster. Russia in Global Affairs, 23(2), pp. 38–42. DOI: 10.31278/1810-6374-2025-23-2-38-42
As new non-nuclear strategic weapons are developed, new nuclear risks arise that are underestimated by strategic deterrence adherents.
Escalation Steps
The creeping escalation of the Ukraine crisis continued throughout 2024. As Russian troops seized tactical initiative on the ground, the Ukrainian army has gradually lost its ability to carry on active hostilities. Its shrinking manpower reserve of legal conscription age, and a lack of artillery ammunition have gradually taken their toll.
Ukraine’s increasingly long-range drone attacks (up to St. Petersburg), and its sorties into Kursk and Belgorod regions in the spring of 2024 were supposed to relieve Kiev’s operational-strategic despondency, but instead provoked large-scale retaliation against Ukrainian electricity generation facilities that began on 22 March and ended only in mid-April. Then, after Russian troops re-entered Kharkov region from the north in May, Ukraine launched a more serious operation into Kursk region in August. Following this incursion, and a fatal ballistic missile attack on civilians at a Sevastopol beach, Russia launched a second series of attacks on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure in late August. These were followed by new Ukrainian long-range drone raids, including a strike on an arms depot in Toropets, Tver region.
But no cardinal changes occurred on the ground: the Russian army slowly but surely fought its way forward in the Donbass, while Ukrainian troops lacked the reserves and resources to stop it as they did in the fall of 2022. This slowly simmering situation could have lasted for a long time had it not annoyed the collective West. Its annoyance is quite understandable: the West has been sending substantial financial aid and, more importantly, almost irreplaceable military supplies to Ukraine for almost three years, but rather than Russia’s “strategic defeat,” it has achieved almost the opposite. On top of it all, on 5 November 2024, Donald Trump won a ticket to the White House and a Republican-controlled Congress for the next two years.
As a result, Ukraine was permitted to fire Western long-range precision weapons—American ATACMS tactical ballistic missiles and Franco-British SCALP/Storm Shadow cruise missiles—‘into the territory of Russia.’ In reality, both systems had already been used since the second half of 2023 against Crimea and the Reincorporated Territories, but Western exceptionalism extends even to cartography.
On 19 November, six ATACMS missiles hit an ammunition depot in Russia’s Bryansk region, and two days later, Storm Shadows struck a command center in Kursk region. Russia responded very quickly and sharply, which only underscored the sensitivity of the issue. An Oreshnik missile with a non-nuclear cluster warhead struck the Yuzhmash defense plant in Dnepropetrovsk, and President Vladimir Putin issued a statement to emphasize the critical importance of the moment.
It was there that the nuclear factor got entangled with non-nuclear ones: the use of powerful non-nuclear high-precision weapons, capable of solving increasingly complex strategic tasks, moved closer and closer to the nuclear threshold. The attacked side cannot unambiguously identify the weapons used against it as nuclear or non-nuclear, and the use of such weapons further has spurred the escalation.
The military crisis in the Middle East in 2024 also showed the ambivalence of dividing long-range weapons into nuclear and non-nuclear ones. In the spring and fall of last year, Israel and Iran exchanged a series of missile and air strikes. While Israel used strike aircraft armed with high-precision air-to-surface missiles, Iran used not only long-range drones but also medium-range non-nuclear ballistic missiles.
Revised Doctrines
The use of non-nuclear strategic missiles was naturally accompanied by the revision of doctrines. Russia announced amendments to its doctrine in late September 2024, and officially published a new edition of the Fundamentals of State Policy in the Area of Nuclear Deterrence on 19 November, when long-range attacks authorized by the West again hit its territory.
The main novelty in this version is the recognition of a special relationship with Belarus. In 2023, Russia abandoned its longstanding Soviet-era definition of NATO’s nuclear-sharing arrangements as a violation of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, and has now acquired its own ‘junior partner’ to whom it will, in an emergency, transfer nuclear warheads for joint use. The new doctrine also asserts a fully-fledged ‘nuclear umbrella’ over Belarus.
The document lists numerous threats (many arising from the Ukraine crisis) that may (but will not necessarily) prompt a response using nuclear weapons:
- The isolation of part of Russia’s territory or a blockade of Russia’s “vital lines of communication.” This refers to speculation by Eastern Europeans (including senior military officials) about blockading the Kaliningrad exclave.
- The “uncontrolled proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, their delivery vehicles and technologies, and equipment for their manufacture.” Many interpret this as an expression of adherence to international arms-control regimes, but it is more obviously referring to the intermittently-raised subject of Ukraine acquiring nuclear or radiological weapons, and it parallels the U.S.’s forcible counterproliferation strategy of the early 1990s.
- The “buildup” of “conventional forces” on the border, as well as “large-scale military exercises” near the Russian border.
- The “launch of ballistic missiles” (not specifically nuclear-armed ones) and delivery vehicles ranging from strategic and tactical aircraft to drones. This is clearly a direct response to the Ukraine conflict.
However, the nuclear doctrine has always been based on the military doctrine’s formula specifying the grounds for using nuclear weapons: since 2010, the use of WMD against Russia, or conventional aggression against Russia that endangers the very existence of the state. In November 2024, the latter clause was altered to permit a nuclear response to conventional aggression against Russia or Belarus if it poses a “critical threat to their sovereignty and/or territorial integrity.”
The new doctrine clearly and unambigiously lowers the nuclear threshold. But the threshold established by the military doctrine of 2000, immediately after NATO’s Yugoslavia campaign, was even lower: “in critical situations for national security.” In other words, the doctrinal wording of 2024, adopted in the midst of acute confrontation between Russia and the West, is still much more vegetarian than the 2000 formula, written at the end of the “little Cold War” when Russia was not faced with a large-scale armed conflict fueled by Western countries and with sweeping economic sanctions.
And both remain far from the immortal American classics: nuclear weapons are used in “extreme circumstances” to protect the “vital interests” of the United States or its allies. Sometimes it is difficult to say what is worse for peace and security: an extremely vague doctrine allowing the use of nuclear weapons whenever one wants, or a laundry-list of conditions. Both suggest a lack of confidence in the nuclear deterrent’s ability to restrain the other side.
Nuclear deterrence is not a strategic panacea, let alone a political one, as illustrated by frustrated demands for the immediate use of tactical nuclear weapons against Ukraine or NATO. These frustrations are understandable: it is unpleasant to learn that the Bomb is a not a guarantee of all one’s interests, but only a guarantee against others’ Bombs. This fact, obvious during the Cold War, now has to be unearthed once again.
Back then, it was understood that a major conflict in Europe would go nuclear within weeks or even days. At one point, the U.S. even stated that it would immediately and automatically use nuclear weapons. This, too, must be unearthed again.
In fact, the two previous world wars were sparked by much lesser geopolitical tensions. If we lived in a nuclear-free world, a large-scale war between Russia and NATO would already be raging.
However, the awareness that any conflict can turn into a nuclear war will not save us from the possibility of such war. But at least it makes decisionmakers realize the senselessness of nuclear warfare.
This is one of the many paradoxes of nuclear deterrence: to constantly ensure inevitable retaliation that is completely senseless from the strategic point of view (a strategy leading to a destructive retaliatory nuclear strike can hardly be called sensible from the point of view of achieving the political goals of war). On the other hand, starting a nuclear war not because of the subtlest of intents but because of impotence in the absence of alternatives would be a weak consolation.
We should be grateful to the inertia of arms control agreements or skillful calculation of military-strategic balances. But in the absence of international political détente, strategic stability plays a cruel joke on those who rely on it by pushing them towards a robust confrontation in areas that are not directly related to it in the hope that the chilling effect of nuclear deterrence will not allow such a confrontation to go beyond the limits. These limits, as evidenced by the conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East, become increasingly blurred as non-nuclear weapon systems are perfected and doctrinal documents are constantly edited. This is like playing ostrich—a position that becomes not just too shaky a basis for power politics but rather a sure way to invite disaster.
