You're right. I was thinking about this from the position of "Nuclear weapons are monstrous and should never be used." and that was clouding my judgement here. It doesn't matter what I think, I'm not in charge of the Russian military. I do hope that your analysis is wrong, as any nation using tactical nuclear weapons will normalise it and make it commonplace, just "another weapon" in the arsenal. But again, what I hope happens doesn't actually have any bearing on reality.
A more sober analysis from my perspective would be that Russia doesn't want to actively attack NATO and turn this conflict into an active war with NATO, but that does rely on NATO also not escalating things on their own, and if they are willing to station Ukrainian troops and air forces, it seems likely that Russia would understand that NATO wants the escalation and so would respond in kind.
You're right. I was thinking about this from the position of "Nuclear weapons are monstrous and should never be used." and that was clouding my judgement here. It doesn't matter what I think, I'm not in charge of the Russian military. I do hope that your analysis is wrong, as any nation using tactical nuclear weapons will normalise it and make it commonplace, just "another weapon" in the arsenal. But again, what I hope happens doesn't actually have any bearing on reality.
A more sober analysis from my perspective would be that Russia doesn't want to actively attack NATO and turn this conflict into an active war with NATO, but that does rely on NATO also not escalating things on their own, and if they are willing to station Ukrainian troops and air forces, it seems likely that Russia would understand that NATO wants the escalation and so would respond in kind.