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Russian President Vladimir Putin has revised his country’s nuclear doctrine days after President Joe Biden’s latest actions.

On Sunday the U.S. president authorized Ukraine to start using American missiles to strike deep within Russia.

The decision sparked fears of a potential World War III:

Two days later on Tuesday, Putin revised his country’s nuclear doctrine to lower the threshold for initiating a nuclear strike.

The new rule says that “Moscow will consider aggression from any non-nuclear state – but with the participation of a nuclear country – a joint attack on Russia,” according to CNN.

“The Russian Federation reserves the right to use nuclear weapons in the event of aggression using conventional weapons against it and/or the Republic of Belarus,” Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said during a phone call with reporters.

So for example, if a non-nuclear country like UKRAINE were to attack using AMERICAN weapons, that might count as a “joint attack” worthy of a nuclear response.

The timing of the rule change is particularly concerning because Tuesday is the same day that Ukraine formally fired several U.S. missiles — namely ATACMS missiles — into Russia’s Bryansk region.

Moreover, “[t]he Russian government had previously signaled that the US approval [of U.S. missiles being fired by Ukraine] would be a dangerous escalation of the war in Ukraine,” CNN noted.

The only good news is that the revision to Russia’s nuclear doctrine was “long-planned,” according to the New York Times, though the specific timing still traces back to Biden’s actions.

“President Vladimir V. Putin … lowered Russia’s threshold for the use of nuclear weapons, a long-planned move whose timing appeared designed to show the Kremlin could respond aggressively to Ukrainian strikes on Russian territory with American long-range missiles,” the Times noted.

Putin first spoke of the rule change in September.

Russia’s previous nuclear doctrine stipulated that Russia could only respond with nukes to direct attacks from other nuclear-equipped nations.

“And it had a higher threshold for the kind of conventional attack that could trigger nuclear use, specifying that such an attack must threaten ‘the very existence of the state,’” the Times noted.

Asked on Tuesday whether Russia might respond to Ukraine’s latest attack with nuclear weapons, Peskov said only that the nation “reserves the right” to use such weapons if an attack creates a “critical threat” to its “sovereignty and territorial integrity.”

“It’s obvious that the outgoing administration in Washington intends to take steps in order to continue fueling the fire and provoking further escalation of tensions,” he previously told the radio station Mayak after Biden’s Sunday announcement, as reported by Newsweek.

“If such a decision was really formulated and announced to the Kyiv regime, then of course it’s a qualitatively new spiral of tensions and a qualitatively new situation from the point of view of the US’s engagement in the conflict,” he added.

In Moscow meanwhile, senior lawmaker Leonid Slutsky slammed Biden, accusing him of deciding “to end his presidential term and go down in history as ‘Bloody Joe.’”

Then there’s Sen. Vladimir Dzhabarov who told Russian state media that the U.S. president’s decision represented “a very big step toward the beginning of the third world war.”

Last up is the official Russian state newspaper, Rossiyskaya Gazeta,  which warned in an editorial that “the madmen who are drawing NATO into a direct conflict with our country may soon be in great pain.”

Vivek Saxena
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