By Bongiwe Dlamini

MBABANE: Russia has tailored its nuclear response doctrine to the specific threat of the long-range attacks it faces from Ukraine, Aljazeera reported on Friday morning.

Russian President Vladimir Putin recently “outlined the approaches” to a new edition of the Fundamentals of State Policy on nuclear weapons use, wrote his right-hand man,deputy head of the National Security Council Dmitry Medvedev, on Telegram on Wednesday.

“A massive launch and crossing of our border with enemy aerospace weapons, including aircraft, missiles and UAVs, can under certain conditions become the basis for the use of nuclear weapons,” he wrote.

“Aggression against Russia by a non-nuclear-weapon state, but with the support or participation of a nuclear-weapon country, will be considered a joint attack,” Medvedev added.

These threat profiles are exactly tailored to describe Ukraine, which gave up nuclear weapons in 1994, but is supported by nuclear-armed states the United Kingdom, France and the United States, and which has been forbidden to use Western-supplied weapons to attack deep inside Russia.

Putin has already said that the use of those weapons would put Russia at war with NATO.