By Lydia Kelly
(Reuters) – A special crisis-relief hotline between the Kremlin and the White House is not currently being used, the Kremlin said on Wednesday, as nuclear risks rise amid the highest tensions between Russia and the West in decades.
Russian President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday lowered the threshold for a nuclear strike in response to a broader range of conventional attacks, days after reports said Washington had allowed Ukraine to use U.S.-made weapons to deeply strike Russia.
Ukraine used US ATACMS missiles to attack Russian territory on Tuesday, taking advantage of permission just granted by the outgoing administration of US President Joe Biden on the 1,000th day of the war.
A so-called hot line between Moscow and Washington was established in 1963 to reduce misperceptions that fueled the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 by allowing direct communication between American and Russian leaders.
“We have a special secure line for communication between the two presidents, Russia and the United States. Even for video communication,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov told RIA. But when asked if this channel is currently in use, he said: “No.”
Moscow said the use of ATACMS, the longest-range missiles Washington has supplied to Ukraine so far, was a clear sign that the West wanted to escalate the conflict.
The war, which Russia began with a full-scale invasion in February 2022, has turned hundreds of Ukrainian cities and towns to dust, displaced millions of people and killed thousands of civilians, the vast majority of them Ukrainians.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy had long been pleading with Washington and its NATO allies to allow the use of long-range weapons, saying they were necessary to destroy military and transportation infrastructure key to Russia’s war efforts. .
Moscow has said such weapons cannot be launched without direct US operational support and that their use would make Washington a direct combatant in the war, prompting Russian retaliation.
Russian diplomats say the current crisis between Moscow and Washington is comparable to the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, when the two Cold War superpowers came closest to intentional nuclear war, and that the West is making a mistake if it believes that Russia will back down on Ukraine.
The Kremlin said Russia viewed nuclear weapons as a means of deterrence and that its updated nuclear doctrine was aimed at making clear to potential enemies the inevitability of retaliation should they attack Russia.
On Wednesday, Peskov told RIA that the West sought to inflict a strategic defeat on Russia by allowing kyiv to deeply attack Russia with US-made weapons.
“And, of course, they use Ukraine as a tool in their hands to achieve these goals,” Peskov said.