I have no doubt that Russia can and would use nukes, but they started making field warfare nuclear weapons that don't wipe out whole cities with one blast. As I understand it the US made a lot of noise about creating small scale nuclear field warfare weapons but never really got into it. Then again, maybe we did. I don't know. However, the Russians definitely went big on creating nuclear artillary, etc. I think that's what they will use. As I understand it, those nukes don't leave the land unuseable for a thousand years. It just so happens that the other day I saw a video of a demonstration of one of those nuclear artillary explosions and it was a monster blast on par with the our MOAB(Mother of all bombs).