After Macron touted troops to Ukraine, Putin warns West of nuclear war risk

President Vladimir Putin has threatened to use nuclear weapons if Western powers send soldiers to within striking distance of Russia.

His comments on Thursday, in a state of the nation address, were the kind of remarks usually uttered by Dmitry Medvedev, a Putin ally who served as Russia’s president from 2008-2012 and prime minister until becoming a top security official in 2020.

Throughout the conflict in Ukraine, Medvedev has warned of nuclear action and penned countless social media posts showering Western leaders and nations with slurs and threats.

“Medvedev used to write posts about the riders of the apocalypse in the style of [US filmmaker Quentin] Tarantino, and Putin brought his threats back to the limits of sanity,” Kyiv-based analyst Aleksey Kushch told Al Jazeera.

Putin has now upped the ante, responding to French President Emmanuel Macron’s assumption on Monday that a deployment of European troops to Ukraine cannot be “ruled out”.

Putin issued his threats during his annual national address – a carefully choreographed ceremony broadcast live to be chopped into soundbites and quotes that Russian media will likely repeat and comment on for days.

The West has “announced the possibility of sending Western military contingents to Ukraine,” Putin said on Thursday. “The consequences for possible interventionists will be way more tragic.

“They should eventually realise that we also have weapons that can hit targets on their territory. Everything that the West comes up with creates the real threat of a conflict with the use of nuclear weapons, and thus the destruction of civilisation,” he said.

Moscow has the world’s largest nuclear arsenal including a new generation of hypersonic missiles and several times more tactical nuclear weapons than the collective West.

“Now it is Putin who clearly draws a red line about using the nukes,” Kushch said, adding that Macron had probed Putin’s reaction on when Moscow would be ready to launch the nukes.

‘Nothing new’

But to Boris Bondarev, a senior Russian diplomat who quit his job to protest against Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, there was “nothing new” in Putin’s menacing diatribe.

The threats were Putin’s “usual scares and a projection of his own unrealised desires on to the West,” Bondarev, who served in the United Nations office in Geneva until 2022, told Al Jazeera.

This was not the first time Moscow bared its teeth in a confrontation with the United States and Europe.

Soviet helmsman Nikita Khrushchev banged his shoe on the podium in the United Nations headquarters in New York in 1960 ranting about “toady American imperialism” and promising “further interventions”.

Two years later, Khrushchev provoked the Caribbean Missile Crisis that nearly triggered a nuclear apocalypse.

Soviet leaders in the late 1970s and early 1980s routinely hinted at the possibility of a nuclear war until Mikhail Gorbachev started his perestroika reforms that prompted a sign of relief in the West, but buried the USSR.

During the war in Ukraine, the Kremlin pulled out of nuclear arms control treaties with Washington in moves that many predicted would start a new arms race.

“This is not a bluff,” Putin said in 2022 when announcing the possibility of a nuclear strike.