Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said on Wednesday that Moscow rejected the ideology of limited nuclear war, and any accusations to the contrary by the West were groundless, according to the RIA news agency.
U.S. Central Intelligence Agency Director William Burns said last month that the intelligence community saw no practical evidence of "Russian planning for a deployment or even use of tactical nuclear weapons," but said the West could not ignore the risk that it might do so.
Russia's official military deployment principles allow for the use of nuclear weapons if they - or other types of weapons of mass destruction - are used against it, or if the state faces an existential threat from conventional weapons.