How to read it
Since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Russian leaders have used nuclear weapons as a backdrop to the war: in speeches, in a revised doctrine, in drills, in moving warheads to Belarus, in leaving or suspending arms-control treaties, and in firing a new nuclear-capable missile at a Ukrainian city with a conventional warhead. This tool puts those signals on one timeline.
Each circle is a Russian signal. Its height is the escalation level in the coding scheme, and its color is the kind of signal. Squares along the bottom are Western and NATO responses. Diamonds along the top are moments in the war itself, so you can see what was happening on the ground when a signal came. Pick a year, switch types on and off, raise the minimum level, or search. Click any mark for the details and the sources.
Coding scheme
The scheme is the tool author's. It asks one question of each Russian item: what did it change? A signal can change nothing but the words in the air, attach a condition to a threat, change the written rules, change the forces themselves, or put a new nuclear-capable weapon to use as a signal. That gives five ordered levels, plus a level 0 for offers of restraint, such as keeping New START limits after the treaty lapsed. Western responses and battlefield moments are placed on the timeline but not scored.
The scheme follows the threshold logic in Walberg (working paper), "Exercise Escalation Ladders", which scores PLA exercises against Taiwan on several dimensions and tracks which thresholds have been crossed, approached or avoided, rather than placing every act on a single rung. Here the dimension is what the signal changed, and the thresholds are the moves from words to rules, from rules to forces, and from forces to use.
Method and limits
Selection. The list covers the main, widely reported signals, not every remark. Medvedev alone has posted nuclear threats many times; the tool includes a few that drew official or wide press attention. Absence from the list does not mean nothing happened.
Sources. Every item links to at least one source that was opened and checked when the list was built, preferring official texts (Kremlin, Russian and U.S. governments, NATO, the UN) and then established reporting. Where an official site blocks automated access, the link goes to the Internet Archive copy.
Dates are the day of the statement or event as reported. Items known only to the month sit mid-month and show the month alone.
What this tool does not do. It does not estimate the chance of nuclear use, and it does not say whether any signal worked. It holds no information on the location of nuclear weapons beyond what governments announced.