A senior former Nato official said Russian president Vladimir Putin contemplated using a tactical nuclear weapon in the autumn of 2022 but was talked out of it.

Rose Gottemoeller, who was Nato deputy secretary general between 2016 and 2019, told a conference in Dublin that it happened in October 2022 when it looked like Russia might lose the war following a successful Ukrainian counterattack in the Kherson region.

Gottemoeller spoke at the Law Society of Ireland’s Centre for Justice and Law Reform summer school in Blackhall Place in Dublin.

Other speakers will include former taoiseach Leo Varadkar, former Ukraine minister for foreign affairs Dmytro Kuleba and former director of US national intelligence Avril Haines.

Gottemoeller said the Biden administration warned Putin behind the scenes not to go down the nuclear route. However, the biggest influence on the Russian president was the Chinese president Xi Jinping and Indian prime minister Narendra Modi, who told him publicly not to use them.

Putin’s own generals also advised him against sabre-rattling about using nuclear weapons.

Gottemoeller said Russia talking about using nuclear weapons has been no deterrent to Ukraine, which has carried on resisting Russia despite the threat.

She believed that Operation Spiderweb a year ago exposed the Russian threat as a bluff. In an audacious raid, Ukrainian special operations forces targeted Russian aircraft capable of delivering nuclear bombs while the aircraft were on the ground.

They concealed Ukrainian-made drones in large trucks which were programmed to open their roofs and allow the drones to fly to their targets.

Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy said at least 41 Russian aircraft were damaged in that attack.

Gottemoeller said she was worried that would be the moment that Russia would launch a nuclear weapon. “Ukraine called their bluff. They only responded with conventional weapons, but it was quite remarkable.”

Europe does not face an immediate military showdown with Russia, but is facing a “myriad of other threats” from Russia, she believed.

Gottemoeller believed Russia is “exhausted” as a result of the war in Ukraine and not in a position to invade its Nato neighbours even if it wanted to.

“We are not facing the worst-case scenario any time soon, but for that reason we need to build up national resilience,” she said.

Instead, Russia was embarking upon cybercrime, sabotage and misinformation as a way of combating the West.

These include cyber attacks such as the ones on the HSE in Ireland in 2021 and attacks on the integrity of the 2016 US presidential election.

Many of these types of attacks are difficult to attribute, but they wear down the fabric of western societies, she warned.

She said governments need to think of an all-of-society approach to dealing with such problems.

She advised the Irish Government to use its hosting of the EU presidency for the next six months to counter these types of threats.

She acknowledged that Ireland’s neutrality policy is “much respected” at home, but an equal number of people in Ireland want the country to spend more on defence.

Relatively cheap drones are changing the battlefield, as witnessed by Ukraine’s ability to target Russia with short and long-range weapons.

All countries are now vulnerable to drone attacks both from states and non-state organisations, she said. Even the United States had shown now difficult it was to deal with such threats.