Russia has tailored its nuclear response doctrine to the specific threat of the long-range attacks it faces from Ukraine, even as Kyiv's forces demonstrated during the past week the devastating effect such attacks can have on Moscow's conventional war effort. 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.

Ukraine destroyed a series of Russian ordnance depots in the 20th week of the war, demonstrating the efficiency of US-supplied HIMARS (High Mobility Artillery Rocket System) rocket systems and other Western systems, and worrying Russian military observers. These Ukrainian attacks appear to be part of preparations for a summer counteroffensive in the southern Kherson and Zaporizhia districts, which border Crimea. Ukraine said it destroyed a key Russian command post in Kherson district along with a weapons arsenal, killing 12 Russian soldiers on July 10. Its armed forces posted drone footage of a depot in flames. Two days later, Ukraine said it had struck another Russian ammunition depot in Nova Kakhovka, also in Kherson oblast, this time killing 52 soldiers.