The rulers also know this and no one is interested in launching a nuclear bomb on a country that they want to occupy. But the danger is another, of launching and exploding a nuclear bomb at a height of 200-250 km over a country and thereby frying the entire electrical network and electronic devices of the country due to the electromagnetic impulse. The danger that they do this is very great.
I think even greater danger is in an accidental nuclear war. There were many incidents during the Cold War where a single individual made the call to start a nuclear holocaust. The more tensions escalate the more likely we are to end up a scenario where somebody’s trigger finger twitches.
The problem is more complex. There also a risk with the conventional weapons in Ucraine, because of the nuclear plants if they are atacked, crating an fallout. Putin also knows that a contaminated country will have no value for him, it will remain in a dead zone for many years. Regarding nuclear weapons, no one is going to launch a long-range missile, which currently lacks any value, because any country today can intercept them. In other words, Russia only has short-range missiles at its disposal, if it wants to launch a nuclear attack, because these are the only ones that do not give time for countermeasures, reaching the target in a few minutes, but these are not going to be included in the plans of Putin, with NATO units on all its borders still able to attack Russia with short- and medium-range missiles in response, while Russia has nowhere near the US to launch a counterattack. He already tried it before with the missiles in Cuba, as a response to the missiles that the US already had on the Turkish border at that time and continues to have there. Detail that was not mentioned in the Cuban crisis.
I don’t see Russia using nuclear weapons in Ukraine for the reasons you stated as well as the fact that it would make Russia toxic geopolitically. Right now, most of the developing world is either aligned or at least neutral towards Russia. Using nukes would quickly change that.
The danger is that either US or Russia will mistake some event for a launch of strategic nuclear weapons and launch their own. Communications between US and Russia have deteriorated significantly and many important nuclear treaties have been rolled back.
As a side note, it’s also worth noting that even US admits that they are unable to track or intercept Russian hypersonic missiles. US currently isn’t able to produce hypersonic weapons of their own, so the balance does favor Russia in a first strike scenario at the moment.
