EGN NEWS DESK
The Kremlin, wanting to make the selection tougher, has leaned closely into the narrative that the president is risking escalation. Last week, it ran a collection of workouts over transfer and use its giant arsenal of tactical nuclear weapons.
After Mr. Stoltenberg’s assertion to The Economist, the Kremlin’s high spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, mentioned that “NATO is flirting with navy rhetoric and falling into navy ecstasy,” and that the Russian navy knew reply. Asked if the Western alliance was nearing a direct confrontation with Russia, he mentioned: “They are usually not getting shut; they’re in it.”
American officers are more and more dismissing such warnings as empty. Russia, they word, has by no means taken the danger of attacking the provision of weapons to Ukraine in Poland or elsewhere in NATO territory. President Vladimir V. Putin has executed all the pieces he might to keep away from direct battle with the Western alliance, even whereas exhibiting off his nuclear capabilities or warning, as Mr. Peskov does often, that the West was risking turning a regional battle into World War III.
“Putin is rattling the nuclear saber to maintain Biden from letting U.S. weapons be used to counterattack,” Joseph S. Nye, a former American navy official and chief of the National Intelligence Council, mentioned on Tuesday. Mr. Nye, an emeritus professor at Harvard, famous that “what you could have occurring is a nuclear bargaining recreation, and a credibility recreation.”
“Putin has increased stakes on this one, and he’ll push onerous to make Biden swerve first,” he added.
That has been true for the reason that first days of the battle, when Mr. Putin ordered nuclear forces to be positioned on alert, in an effort to maintain NATO from serving to Ukraine after the invasion. But after repeated threats from Mr. Putin that he may make use of nuclear weapons, Mr. Biden’s aides appear much less and fewer impressed by the Russian president’s declarations.
