Russian President Vladimir Putin won’t use nuclear weapons to retain control of Crimea, according to a senior Ukrainian official who rejected contrary Western warnings as a product of Russian “propaganda.”
“I don’t think that they [will] use a nuclear weapon, tactical nuclear weapon, against Ukraine,” Ukrainian special representative Tamila Tasheva told the Washington Examiner. “I don’t think so.”
Putin has made ominous gestures toward Russia’s nuclear arsenal over the last year in an apparent effort to discourage the United States and other Western allies from providing military aid to Ukraine. The Kremlin chief’s nuclear saber-rattling rings hollow for Tasheva, in part because he flinched from deploying the weapons when Ukrainian forces drove Russian troops out of Kherson city — just weeks after Putin signed a Russian law annexing the region into the Russian state.
“We de-occupied the territory of the city of Kherson in the end of the autumn last year. … According to their constitution, it’s a part of Russian Federation,” she recalled. “We de-occupied Kherson. According to Russian nuclear doctrine, if we do something [against] their territorial integrity, Russian territorial integrity, they must use immediately nuclear weapons. But they don’t use it, even until now.”
Putin’s repeated failure to enforce his so-called red lines has emboldened U.S. and European officials to increase the quality and quantity of military aid they provide to Kyiv, up to a point, and some Americans echo the Ukrainian appeal for the West to defy Putin further.
“The general point is that Putin doesn’t have red lines,” former Ambassador Bill Taylor, who led the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv on two occasions, told the Washington Examiner. “This ‘escalation’ and ‘red lines’ is a meaningless concept. We need to support Ukrainians to allow them to win, and the Ukrainians need to do what they need to do in order to win, and that’s what they’ve been doing. They have not been deterred from doing what they need to do to push the Russians out.”
