Russia More Likely to Use Nuclear Weapons if This Scenario Occurs: Analyst

Russia is more likely to use nuclear weapons should Ukraine press on with its counteroffensives in retaking territory seized by President Vladimir Putin's forces in the early stages of the war, an analyst has suggested.

Ukraine's army has been conducting successful counteroffensives since early September, driving against Putin's troops on two fronts, in the east of the country and in the southern region of Kherson.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has also vowed to retake the Crimea peninsula in Ukraine's south, which was seized and illegally annexed by Putin's forces in 2014.

At the same time, Putin threatened last month that Russia was prepared to use nuclear weapons to defend Russia's "territorial integrity." U.S. President Joe Biden said on October 6 that the risk of a nuclear "Armageddon" is at its highest level since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis when many feared a nuclear war might be imminent.

The Kremlin on Tuesday appeared to double down on Putin's nuclear warnings, saying that four Ukrainian regions which Putin claimed to have annexed last month are under the protection of its nuclear arsenal.

"All these territories are inalienable parts of the Russian Federation and they are all protected. Their security is provided for at the same level as [it is for] the rest of Russia's territory," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters when pressed on whether the four regions were under Russia's nuclear umbrella.

Max Bergmann, the director of the Europe Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), told Newsweek he believes Putin is now "desperate for some sort of way to try to turn this conflict around."

"There's a lot of frustration that you have, if you're Russian, this huge reserve of nuclear weapons, which is sort of now your claim to great power status. But they're kind of irrelevant—you can't really use them, all you can do is sort of threaten to use them," he said.

Bergmann assessed that if Ukraine continues to make major gains and is approaching Crimea, "that's the scenario where you could perhaps see Russia get very serious about making nuclear threats."

The analyst said he believes Putin is more likely to resort to using nuclear weapons or threaten to do so should his partial mobilization of Russian reserves turn out to be ineffective in the war.

Putin declared a "partial mobilization" on September 21, with his conscription order supposedly targeting reservists and ex-military personnel with "certain military specialties and relevant experience."

The Russian leader said on Friday that "all mobilization activities" in the country will be completed in about two weeks.

"This work is already coming to an end," Putin said at a press conference in Astana. There are now 222,000 people mobilized in the troop formations, out of 300,000."

"If we were to get into a nuclear scenario, it's because mobilization didn't work, and it's not going to be fixed by just more mobilization," Bergmann said.

Newsweek reached out to Russia's Foreign Ministry for comment.