Russia warns NATO by letter that it will resort to nuclear weapons if it suffers an attack on its territory

The development of new strategies and collective defense plans within NATO against Russian hybrid threats is, as of 2026, primarily in the phase of implementation and operational adjustment, no longer in basic political design. The strategic shift was made between 2022 and 2024; what is currently underway is turning it into concrete forces, capabilities, and response mechanisms.

1. From Madrid 2022 to Washington 2024: the political framework is already set

According to official NATO documentation, the process has followed three major milestones:

• Madrid Summit (2022): the new Strategic Concept is approved and the idea of defending “every inch” of allied territory is consolidated. Madrid marks the shift towards a NATO designed for high-intensity conflicts, with more high-readiness forces, a deep update of defense plans, and an explicit emphasis on resilience against hybrid threats and cyberattacks as a central part of collective defense (Madrid declaration and 2022 Strategic Concept).
• Vilnius Summit (2023): a new generation of regional defense plans is adopted, described by NATO itself as the most comprehensive since the Cold War. These plans structure collective defense by large geographic areas and domains (land, sea, air, space, and cyberspace) and set force and capability requirements for each scenario. In parallel, the “Resilience Objectives 2023” are approved, which strengthen allied preparedness against strategic disruptions and hybrid threats, and a new, more integrated cyber defense approach.
• Washington Summit (2024): the Washington Declaration confirms that these regional plans are already in force and that the Alliance is capable of executing them. It emphasizes that more aggressive hybrid actions can reach the threshold of an “armed attack” and trigger Article 5, and insists that NATO is prepared to prevent, deter, and counter hybrid threats (Washington communiqué 2024).

In summary, the high-level political “processing” —new concept, new plans, explicit recognition of the strategic nature of Russian hybrid threats— is closed. The debate no longer centers on whether to adopt these plans, but on how to equip and apply them.

2. Current phase: plan implementation and resilience strengthening

Official NATO information and specialized press monitoring point to several ongoing fronts:

• Integration with national planning: the regional plans now serve as a basis for each ally to translate commitments into real forces, command chains, and exercises. NATO uses them to derive needs for units, air and missile defense systems, large-scale logistics, and command and control capabilities across all domains.
• Resilience against hybrids: the resilience objectives approved in 2023 and subsequent work lines focus on:
  • Protecting critical infrastructures (energy, communications, submarine cables, satellites).
  • Strengthening cyber defense and civil-military cooperation.
  • Improving the ability to detect and respond to disinformation and sabotage campaigns attributed to Russia (Vilnius communiqué and documentation on “countering hybrid threats”).
• Operational readiness: exercises, command certifications, adaptation of NATO’s new force model, and improvement of military mobility are being developed, in line with what the Alliance defines as the logical step after approving the plans (documents on NATO “deterrence and defence”).
• Hybrid response options: NATO is working on packages of measures (diplomatic, economic, cyber, and military) to assist allies under hybrid pressure and to deter future attacks, based on the premise that these actions can activate collective defense.

3. Role of subsequent summits and current tensions

Meetings after Washington —such as the June 2025 Defense Ministerial or the 2026 Ankara summit, analyzed by the newspaper Demócrata— no longer reopen the design of the plans but focus on how to finance and sustain them:

• At Defense Ministers’ meetings, there is emphasis on new capability objectives (air and missile defense, long-range weaponry, large formation logistics) and on expanding defense industrial production, in a context of prolonged war in Ukraine and increased hybrid threats (chronicle of the 2025 NATO Defense Ministers meeting).
• The debate has shifted towards burden sharing: some allies push to exceed the 2% GDP defense spending target by far, while others, like Spain, defend their contribution based on concrete capabilities and deployments, while assuming commitments from the new regional plans (interview with expert Keir Giles and coverage on Rutte and defense spending).
• The latest summits (The Hague, Ankara) consolidate the narrative of a “NATO 3.0”, where Europe must assume greater conventional responsibility while the United States rebalances its global presence, without altering the core of collective defense against Russia (Demócrata analysis on Ankara and U.S. drawdown).

4. What remains truly pending

As of today, the pending steps are less on the legal-political plane and more practical:

• Fulfill the spending and capability commitments that allow equipping the regional plans.
• Deepen the protection of critical infrastructures and digital networks, where Russian hybrid threats are most active.
• Adjust the mechanisms of collective response to hybrid attacks, so that the leap from the political level (recognizing that they can activate Article 5) to the operational is credible.

In terms of “processing,” therefore, NATO has moved from the design phase to a phase of execution and consolidation of its collective defense strategies against Russia, with hybrid threats explicitly integrated into that architecture.

The competencies and powers of the NATO Secretary General are not developed in a single detailed “statute” within the Washington Treaty, but mainly derive from what that treaty establishes about the Alliance's bodies (especially the North Atlantic Council) and from subsequent decisions by the allies themselves. In other words: the founding treaties set the institutional framework and, on that basis, member states have specified through practice and internal agreements exactly what the Secretary General does.

Foundation in the Washington Treaty

The North Atlantic Treaty of 1949 (Washington Treaty) is NATO's constitutive text. It does not contain an article that exhaustively lists the Secretary General's functions, but it does establish two key elements:

• Existence of permanent bodies: the treaty foresees that allies provide themselves with an institutional structure to implement their objectives (collective defense, political consultations, cooperation). This opens the door to creating an executive body and a figure to lead it.
• North Atlantic Council (Article 9): the treaty creates the Council as the Alliance's highest political body and states that it can meet at the level of permanent representatives, ministers, or heads of state and government, and that it can establish subsidiary bodies. In practice, the Secretary General becomes the chair of that Council and head of the civilian structure dependent on it.

On this basis, the Secretary General's functions are understood as those of the political and administrative authority responsible for facilitating the Council's exercise of the powers attributed to it by the treaty.

Political-institutional competencies

Based on what the founding treaties allow and accumulated practice, the following essential political and institutional functions have been configured:

• Chair of the North Atlantic Council: the Secretary General convenes, prepares, and chairs Council meetings, the body that, according to the Washington Treaty, has the primary responsibility to implement the Alliance's objectives. He directs debates, seeks consensus, and formulates conclusions.
• Coordination of subordinate bodies: although the treaty only expressly mentions the Council, it allows it to create subsidiary bodies. The political-military and technical committees created under this framework report politically to the Council, and the Secretary General articulates this reporting chain, supervising that their work aligns with allies' decisions.
• Political representation of the Alliance: as a corollary of his position vis-à-vis the Council, the Secretary General acts as NATO's main political spokesperson to third states, international organizations, and public opinion. This representative function derives from NATO's very nature as an international organization created by treaty.
• Promotion and guardianship of consensus: the Washington Treaty foresees an alliance based on permanent consultation and collective decision-making. The Secretary General has the practical mission of promoting this spirit of consultation, identifying areas of agreement, and mediating disagreements, so that the Council's formal decisions reflect real consensus among allies.

Administrative and management competencies

Besides his political dimension, the founding treaties have given rise to an international organization with its own legal personality, endowed with a secretariat and staff. From this arise more administrative functions of the Secretary General:

• Head of the International Secretariat: he acts as the highest official of NATO's civilian apparatus (International Secretariat), which provides technical, legal, strategic, and administrative support to the treaty bodies. He directs international staff and defines work priorities within mandates agreed by the Council.
• Implementation of Council decisions: the North Atlantic Council's decisions, based on the Washington Treaty, require practical implementation. The Secretary General translates those decisions into instructions for the international structure, supervises their execution, and reports back to the Council.
• Management of the civilian budget: as head of the international structure, the Secretary General plays a central role in preparing and managing the Organization's civilian budget, always under the approval and control of member states gathered in the Council.
• Guarantee of the legal and institutional framework: derived from the constitutive agreements (Washington Treaty and agreements on NATO's status and personnel), he ensures that the Organization's daily activity complies with that legal framework and the decisions adopted by the allies.

Functions in security and crisis management

Although the North Atlantic Treaty mainly enunciates collective defense obligations (such as Article 5) among states and does not grant the Secretary General executive military powers, his institutional position confers a relevant role in security and crisis management:

• Alert and advice to the Council in crises that may affect allied security, relying on military and civilian committees created under the treaty's umbrella.
• Political coordination of the allied response once the Council makes decisions based on the Washington Treaty (for example, activating defense plans, launching operations or missions).
• Spokesperson and strategic communication about adopted measures, explaining how they fit within the collective defense and cooperative security framework established by the founding treaties.

Overall, the Alliance's treaties —especially the Washington Treaty— provide the institutional architecture (Council, subsidiary bodies, secretariat) and principles (consultation, collective defense, cooperation), and on that basis the Secretary General acts as its main civilian political authority, coordinator, and representative, always subject to the collective will of member states.

According to official Russian documents and the most cited analyses, the nuclear doctrine of the Russian Federation sets a relatively limited set of legal and doctrinal conditions to authorize the use of nuclear weapons. The final decision corresponds to the President of Russia, as commander-in-chief, and there is no fully “mechanical” automatic activation of the arsenal. In 2024, this doctrine was updated and expanded, particularly to explicitly include Belarus and to consider scenarios of aggression by non-nuclear states backed by nuclear powers.

Basic doctrine: criteria before 2024

The central framework is contained in the 2020 document “Foundations of the State Policy of the Russian Federation in the Field of Nuclear Deterrence,” whose consolidated interpretation by research centers and the Spanish Ministry of Defense coincides on four major enabling assumptions:

• Response to a nuclear or weapons of mass destruction attack: Russia contemplates the use of nuclear weapons if it or its allies suffer a nuclear weapons attack or other weapons of mass destruction (chemical or biological) (analysis by the Spanish Ministry of Defense).
• Confirmation of a ballistic missile launch: if there is reliable data indicating the launch of ballistic missiles against Russian territory or that of its allies, Moscow reserves the right to respond with nuclear weapons even before impact occurs.
• Attack on critical state infrastructure: the doctrine foresees nuclear use if an enemy attack (not necessarily nuclear) damages or disables key state or military facilities such that the command, control, and response capacity of Russian nuclear forces is seriously compromised.
• Conventional aggression threatening the existence of the state: Russia admits the nuclear option against a large-scale conventional armed aggression that endangers the very existence of the state. This doctrinal point generates the most debate due to its open formulation, in relation to scenarios such as a prolonged war in Ukraine or a direct conflict with NATO.

On this basis, specialized studies conclude that the nuclear weapon is still formally conceived as a deterrence instrument and “last resort”, and Russia does not adopt a “no first use” policy: it reserves the possibility of being the first to use nuclear weapons if the above conditions are met.

Changes introduced in 2024

Various sources agree that on November 19, 2024, Vladimir Putin signed a decree updating the nuclear doctrine, which expands and nuances these conditions without completely transforming them (analysis “Russia's nuclear power”; DW; RTVE).

Among the notable novelties are:

• Explicit incorporation of Belarus: the conditions are expanded to cover not only attacks against Russia but also against Belarus, reflecting the growing military integration between both countries. The use of weapons of mass destruction against Russia or Belarus is defined as a potential trigger for a nuclear response.
• Aggression by non-nuclear states supported by nuclear powers: the revised doctrine contemplates that significant military aggression by a non-nuclear state, when clearly backed by a nuclear power, may activate the Russian nuclear option. This point is read in the context of the war in Ukraine and Western support to Kyiv.
• Treatment of military alliances: the idea is reinforced that aggression from a member of a military alliance (such as NATO) can be understood as aggression by the alliance as a whole, which broadens the range of scenarios in which Moscow could claim an existential threat.
• Critical threat to sovereignty and territorial integrity: it is made explicit that a critical threat to the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Russia or Belarus can justify recourse to the nuclear arsenal, even if the aggression is conventional. This nuance hardens the reading of situations such as long-range missile attacks against targets on Russian territory.

Real scope of the modification

Analysts cited by the Spanish Ministry of Defense and other studies agree that the 2024 update does not represent a radical break with the 2020 doctrine, but it broadens the conditions that could be considered “existential threat” or “serious attack on key allies.” It does not introduce a no-first-use promise nor eliminate previous criteria, but:

• Strengthens the dimension of extended protection to Belarus.
• Adjusts the doctrine to the new context of prolonged war and confrontation with NATO, explicitly incorporating alliance dynamics and indirect support.
• Maintains the formal emphasis on deterrence, but feeds the international perception that the political threshold for use could be more flexible than in the past.

In summary, the Russian nuclear doctrine continues to rest on the idea of conditioned and centralized use by the president, but the 2024 reform expands the range of situations Moscow could invoke as legal and doctrinal justification for potential nuclear weapon use.