SpaceWar.com reports: “Russia’s new nuclear doctrine reflects its hopes to deter Ukraine’s allies from a greater role in the war by establishing red lines hedged with added ambiguity, experts say.

Moscow warned on Tuesday that it would respond after Ukraine fired longer-range US missiles at its territory for the first time, as President Vladimir Putin issued a nuclear threat on the 1,000th day of the war.

Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said the attack showed Western countries wanted to ‘escalate’ the conflict.

Putin signed a decree on Tuesday lowering the threshold for using nuclear weapons, a move that the White House, UK and European Union condemned as ‘irresponsible’.

Washington this week said it had cleared Ukraine to use ATACMS against military targets inside Russia — a long-standing Ukrainian request.

The missile attack would have been ‘impossible without the direct involvement of Americans,’ as well as the French or the British with their Scalp/Storm Shadow missiles, said Russian military analyst Vassily Kashin.

‘From the Russian perspective, this use is equivalent to an attack by them on Russian territory,’ he told AFP…”