A credible report in one of Russia’s last remaining independent newspapers points to the unsettling likelihood that President Putin will eventually turn to the use of tactical nuclear weapons in an effort to strengthen the Kremlin’s faltering grip on Ukraine. That ominous prospect, laid out in the Moscow Times under the headline, “Putin Always Chooses Escalation,” has colored recent comments from both Kyiv and NATO headquarters at Brussels. What this portends for the growing clash between Moscow and the West is a question for which there appears to be no easy answer.

Moscow Times journalists spoke with more than a dozen Russian civil servants and parliamentary deputies, as well as senior executives at public and private companies. All of them said Mr. Putin’s war in Ukraine is set to escalate in the months to come, a dark prediction bolstered by the fresh mobilization of conscripts, yesterday’s illegal annexation of four regions of Ukraine, and the Kremlin’s insistence that its right to use nuclear weapons is not a bluff.