Sergey Karaganov has spent three years pushing Moscow toward the edge of nuclear brinkmanship—and his latest essay suggests he has no intention of stopping. The honorary chairman of Russia’s Council on Foreign and Defense Policy published a sweeping call to arms in early May 2026, framing the conflict in Ukraine as part of a “full-scale world war” that demands a radical overhaul of Russian nuclear strategy. His proposals—from abandoning arms control frameworks to targeting European decision-making centers—read less like academic speculation and more like a blueprint for sustained escalation.
Karaganov’s argument rests on a particular reading of modern history. He traces what he calls Western aggression back to 1917 and positions Russia’s Cold War nuclear achievements as the single event that cracked five centuries of Western dominance. This line of reasoning is nothing new for Karaganov; an unusually intense public debate he initiated in June 2023 preceded the formal revision of Russia’s nuclear doctrine that Putin signed in November 2024. What is new is the degree of specificity. He now advocates scrapping any future START negotiations, resuming nuclear testing, and engineering a doctrinal shift that would explicitly authorize first use under broadly defined conditions of “aggression.”
The Doctrine Debate
The timing is hard to ignore. The New START treaty officially expired on February 5, 2026, and for the first time since 1972, there is no treaty-bound cap on strategic nuclear weapons. Both Moscow and Washington have gestured toward informal restraint—Putin stated in September 2025 that Russia would continue to abide by New START central limits after the treaty’s expiration if the United States did so—but no binding successor exists. After the expiration of New START, the Trump administration stated that a new nuclear arms control treaty should include China. Against this vacuum, Karaganov’s push to accelerate missile production and deploy systems like the Oreshnik finds an audience both inside the Kremlin and beyond.
According to analysis published by RealClearDefense, Russia has since the beginning of its invasion of Ukraine been transitioning its nuclear posture from a traditional defensive deterrence model toward offensive nuclear deterrence and intimidation—moving beyond preserving the status quo to compellence. Karaganov and his co-authors argue that, having lost its “deep strategic forward” with the dissolution of the USSR, Russia can restore geopolitical balance only through this offensive shift.
The Oreshnik system itself has become a tangible symbol of these ambitions. The missile saw its first combat use on November 21, 2024, striking the Ukrainian city of Dnipro. On January 8, 2026, Russian forces launched an Oreshnik from the Kapustin Yar test site that struck Lviv, barely 70 kilometers from Poland’s border. In December 2025, Belarusian President Lukashenko confirmed the system had arrived in Belarus and was entering combat service.
Credibility or Recklessness?
Western analysts remain deeply divided over whether Karaganov’s rhetoric actually shapes policy or merely provides rhetorical cover. Karaganov proposed limited nuclear strikes against Western Europe to reestablish the West’s fear of Russia’s nuclear deterrent; his proposal was rejected by other Russian security experts as well as Putin. Yet the idea of threatening nuclear use to dissuade the West from supporting Ukraine apparently took hold within the Kremlin. A Brookings Institution assessment noted that the latest changes to Russian nuclear doctrine introduce greater ambiguity, which the Kremlin undoubtedly hopes will give Western governments pause.
The French Institute of International Relations offered a more structural explanation, suggesting that Russia could ultimately lower its threshold for use not only to restore the credibility of its nuclear deterrence in the context of the war in Ukraine, but also to compensate for the weakening of its conventional forces and economic potential.
Karaganov’s May 2026 essay also breaks new ground in calling for a formal defensive alignment with Beijing. This year marks the 30th anniversary of the Russia-China strategic partnership, and bilateral military cooperation is described as “increasingly important” by Russian defense officials. Some Western analysts already characterize the Sino-Russian “no-limits” partnership as the driver of an anti-Western axis seeking to reshape the global order. Whether Beijing would entertain anything resembling a mutual defense pact with Moscow remains highly uncertain—China has historically avoided binding security alliances.
What makes Karaganov’s writing dangerous is not that every recommendation will be adopted, but that each provocation shifts the baseline. Three years ago, floating nuclear strikes against NATO members was considered extreme even in Moscow. Today, his language about targeting “locations where elite decision-makers are concentrated, particularly in Europe” barely registers as shocking. Russia has maintained its policy of nuclear deterrence while updates to public policy documents describe a broader range of scenarios for potential use, though it is unknown to what extent this is reflected in changes to military plans. That gap between doctrine and operational planning may ultimately matter more than any single opinion piece—but Karaganov’s persistent drumbeat keeps narrowing it.
Original analysis inspired by Professor Sergey Karaganov from RT. Additional research and verification conducted through multiple sources.
