‘Russia doesn’t want to use nuclear weapons’: The view from wartime Moscow

Putin is revising Russia’s nuclear doctrine at a critical juncture in Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Russia, which holds the world’s largest stockpile of nuclear warheads, has unveiled its new nuclear doctrine, lowering its threshold for nuclear engagement while continuing its invasion of Ukraine.

But as panic sets in across some Western nations, Russian experts say Moscow does not want to tap into its arsenal.

The revised rules, outlined by President Vladimir Putin, say that an attack on Russia with “participation or support of a nuclear power” will be seen as their “joint attack on the Russian Federation”, seemingly responding to the possibility that Ukraine could strike targets deep within Russian territory using long-range weapons supplied by Western allies.

The United States, Ukraine’s most important ally, is the world’s second-largest nuclear power, with 5,224 warheads compared to Russia’s 5,889.

Alexey Malinin, the Moscow-based founder of the Center for International Interaction and Cooperation, told Al Jazeera that from the Russian perspective, a reassessment of nuclear capabilities was necessary in the face of encirclement by hostile powers.