A senior Kremlin official’s prediction that NATO would not “directly interfere” if Russia were to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine is “not right,” according to the civilian chief of the trans-Atlantic alliance.
“He is not right,” NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said Tuesday in response to former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev’s claim that NATO would flinch in a nuclear crisis.
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Stoltenberg and most other Western officials have been at pains to deter Russian President Vladimir Putin from using weapons of mass destruction against Ukraine. Senior Western leaders as a rule have tried to achieve that goal without committing in public to a military response, but a senior Putin ally’s prediction “that NATO will not directly interfere in the conflict even in this scenario” drew Stoltenberg to contradict the Kremlin.
“What we have stated clearly is that there will be severe consequences, but we have not lined out or gone into great detail about what kind of consequences there will be,” Stoltenberg told the Koerber-Stiftung’s Berlin Foreign Policy Forum. “And, of course, we have many ways to respond. And that’s exactly what we have communicated.”
Russian officials have raised the specter of a nuclear attack from the earliest days of the campaign to overthrow Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov stoked that anxiety earlier Tuesday when he claimed that Russia reserves the right to use nuclear weapons to consolidate the Kremlin’s claim to four territories of eastern Ukraine that Moscow has declared to be part of the Russian state.
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“All these territories are inalienable parts of the Russian Federation, and they are all protected,” Peskov said Tuesday. “Their security is provided for at the same level as the rest of Russia’s territory.”
Ukraine is not a member of NATO and thus is not entitled to the protection of NATO’s nuclear forces. Stoltenberg, while emphasizing that point, also argued that Western powers cannot afford to “be intimidated” by Putin’s nuclear threats due to the danger that a Russian victory in Ukraine could convince other “authoritarian leaders” that they can “achieve their goals” by initiative wars of aggression.
“This nuclear rhetoric and the threats that we have seen from Russia — the aim is, of course, to coerce us, to blackmail us, to stop providing support to Ukraine. But if we do that, then President Putin will win in Ukraine,” Stoltenberg said. “That will make us more vulnerable. It will make the world more dangerous. And, therefore — yes, there are risks with all options in this conflict, but I think the risk of letting President Putin win is much higher than to continue to support Ukraine as we do.”
Kremlin nuclear threats reinforce a bald assertion of sovereignty over four regions that Russian forces have not been able to control through conventional military means. Russia’s struggle to repel a Ukrainian counteroffensive has raised the stakes of a debate unfolding in capitals around the world about whether Putin would use nuclear weapons to regain the advantage on the battlefield.
“Let’s imagine that Russia is forced to use its most formidable weapons against the Ukrainian regime. … I believe that NATO will not directly interfere in the conflict even in this scenario,” Medvedev, the deputy chairman of Putin’s Security Council, said on Sept. 27. “The overseas and European demagogues are not going to die in a nuclear apocalypse. That is why they will swallow the use of any weapon in the current conflict.”
That assessment suffers from an extreme case of misplaced confidence, to judge from a warning issued last week by the European Union’s top diplomat. “Any nuclear attack against Ukraine will create an answer — not a nuclear answer, but such a powerful answer from the military side that the Russian Army will be annihilated,” European Union High Rep. Josep Borrell said Thursday.
Norway’s top military officer downplayed the risk of a Russian nuclear strike by emphasizing that “there is no threat to Russia’s existential security,” which means that Putin’s nuclear saber-rattling “is more valuable than if he actually uses them.”
“He can move all his land forces away from the whole NATO eastern border and use them in Ukraine, without any fear of being attacked, because he knows NATO is not a threat to Russia,” Norwegian Gen. Eirik Kristoffersen told Reuters.
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French President Emmanuel Macron emphasized last week that Paris would not use nuclear weapons in retaliation for a Russian nuclear strike, but Stoltenberg rejected the suggestion that Macron’s remark undercut NATO’s wider efforts to deter Putin from using such weapons in Ukraine.
“We have different ways of reacting. It doesn’t have to be any use of nuclear weapons,” Stoltenberg said. “What we have stated, again and again, is that the circumstances in which NATO would consider the use of a nuclear weapon remains very remote. But that doesn’t take away the possibility of NATO to respond, and NATO allies to respond, if there is a use of nuclear weapons by Russia against Ukraine.”
