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WASHINGTON — President Biden’s national security adviser said Sunday that the United States had warned Russia that there would be “catastrophic consequences” for the country if Moscow used nuclear weapons in its growing desperation to retain territory. Ukrainian, adding that in recent days the United States has “clarified” how the world would react in private conversations with Russian officials.

The adviser, Jake Sullivan, repeated the comments repeatedly in three Sunday television interviews, while deliberately leaving it vague whether those consequences would be military, economic or diplomatic. Officials were quick to say they still hadn’t seen any movement in Russia’s stockpile of around 2,000 small tactical weapons – which can be launched from a short- or medium-range missile – despite threats from President Vladimir V. Putin in a televised speech last week. that “it’s not a bluff”.

But Mr Sullivan’s use of the word ‘catastrophic’ as a deliberately ambiguous warning of a major – although almost certainly non-nuclear – response to a Russian nuclear explosion illustrated how quickly the rhetoric escalated as Russia has faltered on the battlefield in recent months. .

At the end of May, Mr. Biden wrote a guest essay in The New York Times in which he said that “any use of nuclear weapons in this conflict on any scale would be totally unacceptable to us as well as to the rest of the world. and would have serious consequences.

US intelligence officials say they still believe the chances of nuclear weapons being used in the conflict are remote. But they think those odds are significantly higher than they were in February and March because Mr Putin has lost confidence in his ground troops’ ability to hold territory, let alone gain control of the country. ‘Ukraine.

Mr. Sullivan is a longtime student of the risks of nuclear escalation, and he has walked a fine line between orchestrating repeated warnings to the Russians and avoiding statements that could spur Moscow to up the ante, perhaps starting to move weapons to the border in a menacing show of seriousness.

He said so on ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday. “We communicated to the Russians what the consequences would be,” Sullivan said, “but we were careful how we talk about it publicly, because from our perspective, we want to lay out the principle that there would be catastrophic consequences, but don’t engage in a game of tit for tat rhetoric.

The White House declined to say with whom within the Russian leadership the officials had communicated, or to characterize the Russian response. But even before Mr. Putin issued his final threats last week, the White House and the Pentagon had quietly engaged in detailed tabletop exercises, according to senior officials, to think through how the United States and their allies could react to various provocations.

These ranged from a detonation over the Black Sea by Mr Putin to the actual use of a weapon against a Ukrainian target. The first of them would be more akin to a North Korean nuclear test, designed as a warning shot. The second would be the first use of a nuclear weapon against a population since the United States bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945.

For months, administration officials said they could think of almost no circumstances in which a nuclear detonation by Russia would prompt a nuclear response. But there have been talks of several non-nuclear military responses – using conventional weapons, for example, against a base or unit from which the attack originated, or giving Ukrainian forces the weaponry needed to launch this counterattack. In the minds of many officials, any use of nuclear weapons would require a forceful military response.

But many of the options under discussion also involve non-military measures, making Mr Putin an international pariah who broke the nuclear taboo for the first time in 77 years. It would be a chance, according to some officials, to involve China and India, as well as much of Asia and Africa, in the effort to impose sanctions on Russia, cutting off some of the largest remaining markets for its oil and gas.

Mr Putin’s nuclear threats have hung over the war since its earliest days, when he publicly ordered nuclear forces to be placed on heightened alert. (There is no evidence that this ever happened.) More recently, the bombing, apparently by Russian forces, of Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant has raised the specter of the deliberate transformation of a commercial facility into a potential dirty bomb. Shelling near the plant has continued in recent days, although the reactors have been shut down, reducing the risk of a nuclear runaway.

On Wednesday, for the first time in more than six months, Mr Putin revived his nuclear threats, saying he could use all the weapons at his disposal in the war – a remark interpreted by officials in Russia and the West as a veiled threat on the use of nuclear weapons.

“If Russia feels that its territorial integrity is threatened, we will use all defense methods at our disposal, and this is not bluffing,” he said. “Those who try to blackmail us with nuclear weapons should know that the winds can also turn in their direction.”

Mr Sullivan has said in several interviews that he takes Mr Putin’s nuclear threats seriously – at one point saying the US was preparing for ‘all eventualities’ of the conflict and working to deter Russia to use nuclear weapons.

“We have the ability to speak directly to senior brass and be clear about our messages,” he said, adding, “Russia understands very well what the United States would do in response to the use of nuclear weapons in Ukraine because we spelled it all out for them.

On NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Sullivan said there would be announcements in the coming days of new Group of 7 nations economic sanctions against Russia – including on Russian entities operating in other countries. – in response to the “fictitious” referenda in Moscow. in certain parts of Ukraine which it occupies.

The vote, which ends early this week, is widely seen as a pretext for Russia to annex these territories.

“We’ve been clear: we’re not going to stop or slow down our support for Ukrainians no matter what Putin tries to do with these fake elections, fake referendums and annexations,” Sullivan said on ‘Face’. CBS News. the nation.”

Ukrainian and Western officials believe the rushed vote would open the door for Mr Putin to assert that Kyiv’s defensive war was an attack on Russian territory.

On Sunday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky reiterated that annexation by Moscow would undermine any fleeting hope for a diplomatic resolution to the crisis.

Mr. Sullivan put it even more bluntly, citing falling Russian troop morale and shortages of precision-guided weapons.

“What we’re seeing are signs of incredible struggle between Russians,” Sullivan said.

“You have low morale, where the soldiers don’t want to fight. And who can blame them because they don’t want to participate in Putin’s war conquest.

He continued: “Russia is disorganized and losing territory to a capable Ukrainian force. And you have a lot of infighting between Russian military leaders. And now the blame game has started to include those replacements.

Eric Schmitt contributed report.