Russia ‘must be ready to use’ nuclear weapons and balks at arms control talks with US
Joel Gehrke
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Russia has no interest in nuclear arms control negotiations with the United States, according to a senior Russian envoy, who implied that Moscow might deploy missiles in the Indo-Pacific to challenge the American alliance network.
“In the current circumstances, it is impossible to hold any meaningful talks with the United States or the West as a whole,” the Russian Foreign Ministry’s Vladimir Yermakov, who leads the arms control directorate, told state-run Tass. “In this sense, the revamped Foreign Policy Concept of Russia highlights the need for taking political and diplomatic efforts to create conditions for rooting out the remaining elements of Western domination.”
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Yermakov linked the impossibility of arms control negotiations to Russia’s wider ambitions even though the latest summary of Moscow’s foreign policy calls for “strengthening and developing the system of international treaties” curtailing nuclear weapons. Yet his comments reprise a leitmotif of Kremlin rhetoric over the last year, as Russian President Vladimir Putin and other officials have touted the nuclear arsenal to discourage Western support for Ukraine.
“In today’s world nuclear weapons for our country have the significance of a bond that keeps the state together,” Kremlin Security Council Deputy Chairman Dmitry Medvedev, a former Russian president under Putin, said Tuesday in a separate appearance. “If you have a weapon in your hands … you must be ready to use it in a given situation, no matter how awful and brutal this may sound. All these factors should not be underestimated by our potential adversaries, the countries that we now quite appropriately call enemies.”
The statements from Medvedev and Yermakov elaborated on the themes that Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov aired at the United Nations Security Council on Monday. The attempt to portray the war in Ukraine as a defensive struggle against the United States and its allies has been a mainstay of Russian rhetoric throughout the war, but United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres condemned the invasion as a “violation of the United Nations Charter and international law” that has fueled the risk of worse conflict.
“We face unprecedented and interlocking crises. But the multilateral system is under greater strain than at any time since the creation of the United Nations,” Guterres said. “Tensions between major powers are at an historic high. So are the risks of conflict, through misadventure or miscalculation.”
Medvedev has made a habit of bellicose rhetoric over the last year, despite his previous reputation as a relative moderate within the Russian system. His latest remarks played in the space between Russia’s publicly acknowledged nuclear doctrine, which stipulates Moscow would only use nuclear weapons as a defensive measure of last resort, and the widespread suspicion that Russian military planners have adopted an “escalate to deescalate” theory of “low-yield” nuclear weapons — a doctrine that contemplates the use of weapons of mass destruction to achieve a quick military victory over a neighbor.
“You’ve said that Russia would never use nuclear weapons first, but that’s not quite so,” Medvedev told a live audience during an education-themed event. “Nuclear weapons can be used when aggression is carried out against Russia with the use of other types of weapons that endanger the very existence of the state. It is essentially the use of nuclear weapons in response to such actions. Our potential adversaries should not underestimate this.”
The meaning of that doctrine has been complicated by Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the purported annexation of four other Ukraine regions last fall. Putin signed a law to incorporate the four regions into the Russian state even though Russian forces had not occupied the entirety of the regions. And then, weeks later, his forces withdrew from Kherson, the capital city of one of the annexed regions.
“I cannot say what the last straw, what the trigger may be,” Medvedev said. “But it may happen at some point. We all need to work to ensure that this threat of global confrontation, of a hot, full-scale World War III, should not materialize.”
Lavrov and his colleagues broadened Moscow’s complaint to encompass cooperation between the U.S. and its allies in the Indo-Pacific. “No one is hiding the fact that this Indo-Pacific strategy is seeking to contain China and isolate Russia,” Lavrov said Monday. “This is how our Western colleagues interpret the concept of effective multilateralism in the Asia-Pacific Region.”
The war in Ukraine has galvanized new modes of cooperation between U.S. allies in NATO and the Indo-Pacific, in part because Japanese officials fear that China could take Putin’s nuclear saber-rattling as a model for an invasion of Taiwan. U.S. officials hope to deploy land-based missiles in the region that could counter China’s growing military, as Beijing has developed forces designed to target the U.S. Navy’s aircraft carriers and other major U.S. warships, but Yermakov signaled that Moscow would consider “the deployment of intermediate- or shorter-range missiles in individual regions” in response.
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“As for US-made missiles that can be deployed in the Asia-Pacific region, including Japan, their high-speed characteristics are not the only criterion by which we will assess such a deployment,” Yermakov told Tass. “The range of those missile systems is as important.”
Putin might be willing to revive arms control talks after the war in Ukraine, the envoy added. “We are in no way abandoning such a possibility in the future, after achieving the goals of our ongoing special military operation,” he said. “I will reiterate it once again: this can only be implemented if Russia’s core interests are respected and taken into account.”