For all the talk in the distant early months of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine about how the risk of nuclear escalation could lead to a third world war, it is worth recalling that when the previous global conflict started nuclear weaponry belonged to the future. Now a new development in Ukraine’s efforts to give Vladimir Putin the boot is making the Kremlin carp that Berlin is fanning the flames of another world war. 

While that might sound like a case of the samovar calling the kettle black, it stems from the likelihood that Germany will begin supplying Ukraine with Taurus cruise missiles — a move that would ratchet up tensions in the region as the weeks of grinding, attritional warfare slide into a possibly even more fraught fall fighting season.

The evocation of a third world war by tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda, which is more or less Kremlin propaganda, lifts a lid on President Putin’s view of the where the war is right now. It also raises the stakes regarding what choices President Biden will make on the level of assistance to Ukraine ahead of an American election season. 

For Mr. Putin and a certain generation of Russians, Germany is the root if not of all evil then certainly a large amount of it. On Friday the German news program Taggesshau reported that Germany has “apparently given up its refusal to deliver Taurus cruise missiles to Ukraine” — save for the sole condition that the weapons’ targeting software be modified to disable them from striking targets within the borders of the Russian Federation. 

Before that report, Germany had not taken up Ukraine on its repeated requests for the missiles. Officially, it still has not, and previously both Chancellor Scholz and Germany’s defense minister, Boris Pistorius, have reiterated that Germany’s primary role in contributing assistance to Ukraine should be limited to air defense and tank provisions. 

Der Spiegel has since confirmed that a “rethink” of that more cautious strategy, pinned on avoiding overtly antagonizing  Moscow, is now afoot. According to the news magazine, the German government is already engaged in classified discussions with defense industry representatives that aim principally to incorporate software modifications to the missiles.

Furthermore, according to other reports, about a dozen Soviet Sukhoi Su-24 bombers from the Warsaw Pact era that are already in Ukraine have been converted for the Taurus missiles as well as for the long-range Anglo-French Storm Shadow missiles that Britain has already sent Ukraine.

The Taurus KEPD 350 is no poodle. An air-launched cruise missile of Swedish-German design, the Taurus makes use of stealth technology to deliver a dual-stage 1,100-pound “Mephisto” warhead to targets within a range exceeding 300 miles. The missiles are designed to evade radar and deliver high-precision strikes against targets as diverse as tanks and rocket launchers and even heavily fortified military bases. 

No wonder, then, that Kyiv has been clamoring for what is arguably the most advanced European-made cruise missile available. How many are actually operational and available is another question.

Germany reportedly has an inventory of 600 Taurus missiles, but only 150 are considered to be combat-ready. The technical modifications now being discussed at Berlin, and presumably with its partners, could take several weeks, so it is unlikely any will be delivered to the battlefront before autumn.

Russian military bloggers have written that Russia’s Pantsir anti-aircraft missile systems have worked reasonably well against Storm Shadow missiles and that the Pantsir or similar systems can be adapted to fend off the Tauruses.

Regardless of whether that is the case, Russian hackles are clearly raised. For Moscow, the prospect of German missiles being used against its military assets is tantamount to Berlin’s entry into a proxy war against Russia, that, as one Russian news report put it, “started with barrels and grenade launchers, then air defense systems, shells and guns, followed by armored vehicles and Leopard tanks.”

The kicker? As Komsomolskaya Pravda claimed, now “German crosses from the time of the Nazi Wehrmacht are again coloring the Donetsk steppes, and German bombs fall on the descendants of those who 80 years ago brought Nazi Germany to its knees.” 

More troublingly — at least for Ukraine and the West — is that Mr. Putin views those Donetsk steppes of eastern Ukraine as part of Russia. It is where most of the fighting on the ground is taking place. 

It is axiomatic in the Russian strongman’s thinking that during World War II it was the Soviet Union that played an outsize role in shielding humankind from the evils of Nazism. That view has transmogrified into the current one that Russia is under attack from a chaotic and secular West — hence the official reference to the war in Ukraine as a “special military operation.” 

As Germany ramps up its military aid to Kyiv, look for two things to happen. First, it will give fodder to the far-right Alternative für Deutschland party, which in recent months has become a major political force in Germany and is also unambiguously pro-Russia. This sets the stage for considerable domestic turmoil in Germany ahead of European parliamentary elections in the spring. 

Mr. Biden is likely be aware that putting more powerful weapons in the hands of Ukrainians will, given Moscow’s obsession with 20th century history, not be met with gentle Russian acquiescence. In other words, absent any breakthrough on the diplomatic front, the war is about to get bigger.