Russia wields the nuclear saber again as Ukraine devastates its munitions

Russia has tailored its nuclear response doctrine to the specific threat of long-range attacks from Ukraine, even as kyiv’s forces demonstrated last week the devastating effect such attacks can have on the defense effort. conventional war from Moscow.

Russian President Vladimir Putin recently “outlined the approaches” to a new edition of the Fundamentals of State Policy on the use of nuclear weapons, his right-hand man, deputy head of the National Security Council Dmitry, wrote on Wednesday Medvedev, on Telegram.

“A massive launch and crossing of our border with enemy aerospace weapons, including aircraft, missiles and drones, can, under certain conditions, become the basis for the use of nuclear weapons,” he said. writing.

“Aggression against Russia by a non-nuclear-weapon state, but with the support or participation of a nuclear-weapon country, will be considered a joint attack,” Medvedev added.

These threat profiles are exactly suited to the description of Ukraine, which renounced nuclear weapons in 1994, but which is supported by nuclear weapon states, namely the United Kingdom, France and the United States, and who were prohibited from using Western-supplied weapons to attack in depth. inside Russia.

Putin has already said that the use of these weapons would put Russia at war with NATO.

This latest measure appears intended to cool the threat of a first strike. Russian officials recently told the Washington Post that the oft-repeated threats had become commonplace through overuse and that they “scared no one” in the West.

Ukraine used drones of its own making to strike Russian logistics centers and reminded Russia on Saturday what it could achieve even without using UK-supplied Storm Shadow cruise missiles and tactical missiles from the US Army (ATACMS).

Military intelligence and special forces drone operators attacked Russian munitions depots at Tikhoretsk in Krasnodar Krai, 300 km (185 miles) southeast of the Free Ukrainian Territory, and at Toropets in Tver, 500 km (310 miles) north of Ukraine.

The Ukrainian General Staff estimated that the Tikhoretsk attack destroyed 2,000 tons of munitions.

Estonian intelligence chief Colonel Ants Kiviselg said the attack on Toropetsk could have cost the Russian army three months of supplies.

“Thirty thousand tons of ammunition exploded, or 750,000 shells,” Kiviselg told the ERR newspaper. “This is actually a two to three month supply of ammunition. As a result of this attack, the Russian Federation suffered ammunition losses, and we will see the consequences of these losses on the front in the coming weeks.

Commercial satellite photographs of the sites later showed bunkers separated by earthen ramparts completely burned.

Russian civilians filming the smaller of the two explosions saw a huge explosion and a mushroom cloud over Tikhoretsk.

“Such a quantity of material highlights the lack of operational security at Russia’s rear supply depots, demonstrating the extent to which Western restrictions prohibiting Ukraine from firing Western-supplied weapons into Russia have given the command Russian flexibility in not properly protecting its rear areas. “wrote the Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based think tank.

“This flexibility gave Russia the ability to leverage large rear staging facilities to deliver massive equipment to Ukraine on a large scale. »

Ukraine sought to use Storm Shadows and ATACMS to strike Russian TU-95MS and Sukhoi-35 bombers as they took off from Russian airfields to drop glide bombs on the Ukrainian front lines.

These inertial bombs, equipped with flight surfaces and sometimes guidance systems, have a range of 40 to 60 km (25 to 37 miles). Ukraine said the only way to stop them was to shoot the planes before they left their payloads. Each bomb carries between 250 kg (550 pounds) and three tonnes of explosives and has a devastating impact.

This was demonstrated on Monday, when Russia first dropped glide bombs on the city of Zaporizhzhia, damaging 14 buildings and two schools and injuring 21 people.

On September 19, the European Parliament adopted a resolution by 425 votes to 131 with 63 abstentions to lift restrictions on Ukraine’s use of Western weapons.

Russian Duma Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin responded: “What the European Parliament is demanding opens the way to a global nuclear war. »

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has warned that Russia’s nuclear response may not take the form of a nuclear weapon, but of a power plant.

“Putin appears to be planning attacks on our nuclear power plants and their infrastructure, with the aim of disconnecting them from the electricity grid,” he said at the 79th United Nations General Assembly in New York.

“With the help of…satellites of other countries, Russia obtains detailed images and information about the infrastructure of our nuclear power plants.”

Zelenskyy clarified in an interview with ABC News the day before that he was referring to China.

“Russia uses Chinese satellites and takes pictures of details of objects at nuclear facilities,” he said.

Ukrainian presidential adviser Vladyslav Vlasyuk said this week that 60 percent of foreign components in Russian-made weapons come from China.

The drone race

The attacks on Tikhoretsk and Toropets were carried out with Ukrainian-made drones.

Ukraine has also pioneered precision bombing techniques against armored vehicles and personnel, using small first-person viewing drones.

Given Western restrictions, Ukraine pledged in December to build at least a million smaller drones this year. His Defense Minister, Rustem Umyerov, said on Saturday that this target would be exceeded.

“Our capacity is several million drones, we are capable of doing this,” Umyerov said during a telethon. “Next year we will not let the enemy bypass us, so we will already produce several times more.”

Putin recently said that Russia produced 140,000 drones last year and would increase that figure tenfold in 2024.

On Monday, the European Union proposed a loan of 35 billion euros ($39 billion) by the end of the year to help Ukraine meet its 2025 production targets.

The loan would be the EU’s contribution to a 45 billion euro ($50 billion) pledge from the G7.

Even if part of the loan is to be spent on building bomb shelters for schools, the money would massively increase the size of Ukraine’s defense industry, which Umyerov recently valued at $20 billion. euros ($22 billion).