By Lidia Kelly
(Reuters) – Changes to Russia’s nuclear doctrine have been drawn up and will be formalised as necessary, the Kremlin said on Tuesday, signalling again Moscow’s concern over the latest U.S. decision on missile strikes from Ukraine.
“They (the changes) have already been practically formulated. They will be formalised as necessary,” Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin’s press secretary, told the TASS state news agency in remarks published on Tuesday.
The Kremlin called on Monday the reported decision by President Joe Biden’s administration to allow Ukraine to fire American missiles deep into Russia reckless and it warned that Moscow will respond.
Russia, which started its full-scale invasion of Ukraine 1,000 days ago, has repeatedly cautioned that the West is playing with fire by probing the limits of what a nuclear power might or might not tolerate.
In September, President Vladimir Putin said that Western approval of Kyiv’s use of long-range missiles would mean “the direct involvement of NATO countries, the United States and European countries in the war in Ukraine” because NATO military infrastructure and personnel would have to be involved in the targeting and firing of the missiles.
Biden’s decision followed months of pleas by President Volodymyr Zelenskiy to allow Ukraine’s military to use U.S. weapons to hit Russian military targets far from its border.
The U.S. decision came largely in response to Russia’s deployment of North Korean ground troops to supplement its own forces, a development that has caused alarm in Washington and Kyiv, sources told Reuters.
Russia calls its war in Ukraine a special military operation, while Kyiv and its Western allies call it an unprovoked, imperialistic land grab.
Russian forces control about a fifth of Ukrainian territory and have recently been advancing swiftly. Thousands of people have died in the war, the vast majority of them Ukrainians.
Just weeks before the November U.S. presidential vote, Putin ordered changes to the nuclear doctrine to say that any conventional attack on Russia aided by a nuclear power could be considered to be a joint attack on Russia.
Western analysts have called the changes an escalation in Moscow’s attempts to dissuade the West from expanding its military aid to Ukraine. The full details of the amended doctrine have not yet been made public.
The war in Ukraine has triggered the worst crisis in Moscow’s relations with the West since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.
Peskov told TASS on Tuesday that Moscow is ready to normalise its ties with Washington.
“But we cannot tango alone,” Peskov said. “And we are not going to do it.”
(Reporting by Lidia Kelly in Melbourne; Editing by Jacqueline Wong and Kim Coghill)
