West shouldn't undersell Putin's nuclear threats

There Vladimir Putin goes again, swinging his nuclear Johnson.

- ROSIE DIMANNO

Russia hasn't actually conducted a nuclear weapons test since 1990, a year before the Soviet Union fell.

But it's still the world's largest nuclear power. And jangling his junk clearly comes quite viscerally to Russia's autocratic president, up to his eyeballs in a foolish war he started against Ukraine, unable to crush his unyielding enemy, though neither country is anywhere near to claiming even a prelude to victory.

Yet stung by Ukraine's surprise thrust into Kursk last month a counter-offensive surge that has provided an immense morale boost for Ukrainians, although its longerterm impact is impossible to assess ― ― and further riled by intimations that the United States will approve delivery of long-range western missiles to Kyiv, capable of striking targets deep inside Russia, Putin is back to nuclear sabre-rattling.

In his clearest warning thus far of nuclear consequences, Putin on Thursday at least rhetorically drew a line in the sand, dangling the possibility of deploying nuclear warheads against Ukraine and conventional missiles within striking distance of American allies in Europe. Handing Ukraine the missiles that President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has been pleading for AngloFrench cruise missiles, British Storm Shadows would put NATO countries directly "at war" with Russia, Putin declared.

"This will mean that NATO countries the United States and European countries are at war with Russia," Putin told Russian reporters. "And if this is the case, then, bearing in mind the change in the essence of the conflict, we will make appropriate decisions in response to the threats that will be posed to us."