When Vladimir Putin readied for the invasion of Ukraine, amongst his final actions was an exercise of Russia's nuclear forces which tested the readiness of its nuclear arsenal and the delivery systems of ships, submarines, aircraft and missiles that would carry them across the globe. Ostensibly it would have also checked the communication systems to ready the weapons for launch and the codes to activate the actual launch. Coming as it did, just a month before the invasion of Ukraine and accompanied by much publicised photos of Putin himself watching the exercises, it was a clear statement of how far he was willing to go in pursuit of his eventual aims.

The nuclear threat has come up thrice during the war, mainly voiced by the Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, who warned that "World War III will be a nuclear war"-a thinly veiled warning that should external forces enter the conflict, it could resort to nuclear means. The bombast cannot be completely discounted as an idle threat. And when the West did launch the most powerful weapon in its arsenal-sanctions-Russia went ballistic (pardon the pun). It compared the crippling sanctions to a nuclear strike on its economy and it placed its nuclear forces in a state of “Special Readiness Alert”, a heightened state of readiness that would reduce the time taken to launch a nuclear attack should that dreadful situation arise.