Yeah I looked into this. It's not really new per se.

So... back in the hoary days of the Carter white house the Soviets started putting intermediate-range nukes in Eastern Europe. The intent was, obviously, to nuke Europe.

This made West Germany upset. So the US, under Reagan, countered by putting Pershing IIs in West Germany.

Reagan being Reagan, we started developing the BGM-109 Tomahawk cruise missile, a ship-based stalwart of American saber-rattling

Into the BGM-109G "Ground Launched Cruise Missile" purely to piss the Soviets off.

Worthy of note: Tomahawks are conventionally-armed but can be nuclear quite easily; the GLCM was nuclear and therefore a provocation. The Soviets responded predictably by converting the KH-55 air-launched cruise missile

into the trailer-launched RK-55 ground-launched cruise missile, photos of which are rare because the INF treaty stopped the madness and pulled Pershing IIs, SS-20s, GLCMs and RK-55s out of Europe, hooray for Reagan, hooray for Gorbachev, apparently the Russians love their children, too.

But we still have Tomahawks and the Russians still have KH-55s and apparently, Putin dusted off some old KH-55s, put nuclear warheads on them and deployed them around Kapustin Yar. Which is a traditional Russian rocket test site and Ukraine-adjacent.

We're talking two battalions. Assume 10 soldiers per missile we're talking under 200 missiles, each about the size of a family canoe. This could literally be Putin deciding to leave his toys out of the hangar so the NRO could take pictures of them and be upset. This is an easy gimme provocation where Putin gets to look aggressive, Trump gets to "negotiate" the dismantling of those two battalions and Putin gets to do it again in two years just in time for the midterms. This is literally a function of grabbing spare parts out of stores and putting them together for a satellite photo op using plans that were benched 30 years ago.