Russian Nuclear Weapons: Past, Present, and Future - Strategic ...

against Russia or its allies, nuclear weapons could also
be used “in response to large-scale aggression involving
conventional weapons in situations that are critical
for the national security of the Russian Federation
and its allies.” 12
The new document divided all possible armed
conflicts into four categories:
1. “armed conflict”—a predominantly domestic
conflict, in which insurgents have outside support
(effectively, the war in Chechnya, whose resumption
was already obvious by the time of the adoption of the
new Doctrine in the spring of 2000);
2. “limited war”—a war with one foreign states
with limited goals (a recent example is the war with
Georgia in 2008);
3. “regional war”—a war with a powerful state or
a coalition, which Russian forces cannot win or terminate
on favorable conditions. Russian military publications
of the period believed that regional war could
be a direct result of escalation of “armed conflict” (for
example, as a result of outside interference into the
war in Chechnya 13 ); and,
4. “global war”—a war against a coalition of powerful
states in which sovereignty and very survival of
Russia are at stake.
That is, compared to the 1993-97 documents, which
assigned nuclear weapons only to the fourth type of
conflicts, the 2000 document expanded nuclear missions
to the third type. This was a direct result of the
war in Kosovo, whose impact on Russian national security
of the period is difficult to overestimate. Paradoxically,
until 1999 Moscow seemed to believe that
the right of veto in the UNSC made it immune to the
use of force. Kosovo, as well as the 2003 war in Iraq a
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