On May 4, 2025, russian President Vladimir Putin stated that since russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, "there has been no need to use those [nuclear] weapons... and I hope they will not be required". He also claimed that "russia alone, in fact, is confronting the entire collective West", according to the UK Defense Intelligence.
Vladimir Putin's allusion to the potential russian use of nuclear weapons continues the trend of ambiguously threatening nuclear rhetoric expressed by russia's senior leadership since at least 2007, which has heightened since russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
Read more: The UK Defense Intelligence Analyzes How Kremlin Prioritizes Military Spending Despite Widening Deficit and Lower Reserves
Russian senior leadership regularly refers to the war against Ukraine as a war against the "entire collective West", as opposed to the initially posited, so-called "special military operation", implicitly limited in time and scale. The rhetoric evidenced in this trend highly likely seeks to excuse both the length of the war, and the continually increasing scale of russian losses (likely over 950,000 casualties, including 200,000-250,000 russian soldiers killed). It is also highly likely aimed at situating the domestic population for a longer-term conflict and the associated decline in domestic living standards.
As Defense Express previously reported, russia has likely incurred approximately 950,000 casualties (killed and wounded) since launching the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. In the first four months of 2025, russia likely sustained approximately 160,000 personnel losses. Should this dynamic persist for the rest of 2025, this would be the costliest year of the war for the russian troop count, continuing the year-on-year trend of growing casualty rates.
As Defense Express also outlined earlier, pressures on the russian state's ability to finance its planned budget in 2025 will almost certainly increase due to the recent drop in oil prices. Lower oil price expectations have resulted in the Ministry of Finance of russia revising down its forecast for 2025 oil and gas revenues by almost 25 per cent, from 10.94 trillion rubles (USD $135bn) to 8.32 trillion rubles (USD $103bn). Meanwhile, the 2025 budget deficit forecast has increased from 0.5 per cent of GDP to 1.7 per cent of GDP.
Read more: The UK Defense Intelligence: Despite Continued Losses, russia Has Failed to Achieve Major Gains in Ukraine This Year
