Biden considers allowing Ukraine to attack Russia with US weapons

The Kremlin, seeking to complicate the decision, is leaning heavily on the narrative that the president is risking escalation. Last week he conducted a series of exercises to test how he can move and use his large arsenal of tactical nuclear weapons.

Following Stoltenberg’s statement to The Economist, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said: “NATO is flirting with military rhetoric and falling into military ecstasy,” and the Russian military knows how to respond. Asked whether the Western alliance was on the verge of a direct confrontation with Russia, he said: “They are not just on the verge of it, they are in the middle of it.”

American officials increasingly dismiss such warnings as empty talk, pointing out that Russia has never taken the risk of attacking arms deliveries to Ukraine, in Poland or elsewhere on NATO territory. President Vladimir Putin has done everything he can to avoid direct conflict with the Western alliance, even as he flaunted his nuclear capabilities or, as Peskov regularly does, warned that the West is in danger of turning a regional conflict into a third world war.

“Putin is rattling his nuclear saber to prevent Biden from allowing the use of U.S. weapons to counterattack,” Joseph S. Nye, a former American military official and chairman of the National Intelligence Council, said on Tuesday. Mr. Nye, a professor emeritus at Harvard, noted: “What is happening here is a nuclear negotiation game and a credibility game.”

“Putin has more at stake in this issue and will do everything he can to get Biden to back down first,” he added.

This has been the case since the first days of the war, when Putin ordered nuclear alert to prevent NATO from helping Ukraine after the invasion. But after repeated threats from Putin that he might use nuclear weapons, Biden’s advisers seem increasingly unimpressed by the Russian president’s comments.