This is the specter that has worried the whole world since the start of the conflict in Ukraine. Could Moscow use nuclear weapons against kyiv to win this war?
Because if the spokesman for the Kremlin, Dmitry Peskov, recently brushed aside this hypothesis by saying that the ongoing conflict “will never constitute a reason justifying the use of nuclear weapons”, the rest of his statement leaves more circumspect.
Indeed, on Monday March 28, the diplomat also made a point of recalling that Russian doctrine does not completely rule out the use of an atomic weapon, but it links this eventuality to a “existential threat” who would rise up against Russia. This poses a problem, since, as explained to the Washington Post Sarah Bidgood, “we don’t have a good idea of what represents an ‘existential threat’ in the eyes of Vladimir Putin”.
For this expert from the Center for Non-Proliferation Studies, what makes the equation even more difficult to solve is the existence of a