This effectively brought to fruition a journey he had announced back in a speech delivered on March 1, 2018 when he unveiled a series of new Russian strategic weapons designed as a response to America's continued nullification of arms control agreements regarding missile defense.

In his 2008 address, Putin outlined the efforts undertaken by Russia over the years to get the US to scale back missile defense programs Russia viewed as representing an existential threat to its survival. "You didn't listen to our country then," Putin concluded. "Listen to us now."

Chief among Russia's concerns was that continued US pursuit of missile defense capabilities, when coupled with an American nuclear posture that envisioned the possibility of pre-emptive nuclear war, could create the conditions in which US nuclear war planners could believe that an American first strike designed to neutralize Russia's strategic nuclear capability, when combined with a missile defense shield the US believed could shoot down most, if not all, of any Russian missiles that might survive such an attack, might actually be viable.

In the audience at the Valdai Discussion Club was Sergei Karaganov, a well-known Russian political scientist who, in an article titled "A Difficult but Necessary Decision," published on June 13, 2023, in the journal Russia in Global Affairs, articulated in favor of Russia moving away from a nuclear posture based upon assured nuclear retaliation to one that favored pre-emption. "We will have to make nuclear deterrence a convincing argument again," Karaganov wrote, "by lowering the threshold for the use of nuclear weapons set unacceptably high, and by rapidly but prudently moving up the deterrence-escalation ladder."

"According to Karaganov, "If we correctly build a strategy of intimidation and deterrence and even use of nuclear weapons, the risk of a 'retaliatory' nuclear or any other strike on our territory can be reduced to an absolute minimum. Only a madman," Karaganov argued, "who, above all, hates America, will have the guts to strike back in 'defense' of Europeans, thus putting his own country at risk and sacrificing conditional Boston for conditional Poznan."