This was stated to Espreso by Oleksii Izhak, analyst at the National Institute for Strategic Studies and co-founder of the Defense Information Consortium.According to him, Donald Trump did what no previous U.S. president had done: he lifted the taboo on American nuclear rhetoric. In response to another nuclear threat against the U.S. from United Russia chairman and former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev, Trump ordered nuclear submarines to be deployed to relevant regions.The expert believes Trump’s “move” against Medvedev, backed by the maneuvers of nuclear submarines, may not have been an emotional reaction but rather “a cold offer addressed to Putin: either dismantle your regime with your own hands or change your policy — in this case, the policy toward the war against Ukraine.”“Deprived of its usual tool of nuclear blackmail, Russia can no longer effectively restrict the flow of American weapons to Ukraine or demand bans on their use against targets on Russian territory,” Izhak said. He noted that it was precisely nuclear blackmail in the first half of 2022 that prolonged the Western moratorium on supplying Ukraine with field artillery and armored vehicles and limited the provision of light arms for guerrilla warfare.Now, the Kremlin has not dared to continue with nuclear rhetoric. After Trump’s nuclear submarine maneuvers, Putin attempted to remind the world of the Oreshnik, and the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs underscored this reminder with a statement that Russia would no longer adhere to self-imposed restrictions on intermediate- and short-range missiles.“The Oreshnik project turned out to be pointless. The missile has severe problems when launched at minimum distances — even a thousand kilometers. Its accuracy is catastrophically poor. A payload of around one ton doesn’t offer greater combat effectiveness than a single Kh-22 supersonic missile or two Iskander-M ballistic missiles — but at an order of magnitude higher cost (tens of millions of dollars instead of millions). And they have to produce it by diverting production capacity from making Yars ICBMs, with which Russia is desperately trying to maintain strategic arms parity with the U.S.,” Izhak explained.He emphasized that Russia has no other non-nuclear means to attract U.S. attention and distract from mutual dialogue about ending hostilities. “The only value of the Oreshnik as a weapon is that its launch gets registered by U.S. early warning systems, and by the practice of nuclear states, this demands communication that is independent of all other circumstances,” the expert noted.According to him, by invoking the Oreshnik and the forgotten treaty, “Russia is trying to say it is ready not to launch it (and it’s unclear if it can even fly again), provided Ukraine doesn’t receive new strike systems with a range from 500 to several thousand kilometers and doesn’t use them against Russian territory. It’s the same story as Russia’s vague offers of an aerial truce — readiness to halt airstrikes on Ukrainian cities if Ukraine refrains from obtaining additional airstrike capabilities against military targets in Russia.”But Oleksii Izhak concludes: “Russia can no longer stop the next stage of military aid to Ukraine or limit its use against targets on Russian territory with nuclear rhetoric — not if the logic of war demands otherwise.”