Is an escalation because they are bases used by nuclear capable planes. Any attack on these bases is considered equal to threatening the nuclear assets of the country.
You know what the response against that is, right?
Anything that threatens the nuclear deterrent capability will make a nation-state very nervous for the obvious reason that the nuclear deterrent is a state's ultimate guarantee against existential destruction. (Note the
recent tiff between Belgium and the UK over Belgium blocking the export of technology essential to the UK's nuclear deterrent capability.)
However, what you are suggesting is
actual use of thermonuclear weapons against another sovereign state, which is not "defending the deterrent" but rather a "launch-on-warning" response; i.e. "use these assets right now or we lose them, because enemy missiles are in the air." To suggest that (repairable) damage to two (2) dual-use units of the least survivable, flexible and prompt leg of the nuclear triad (out of 72 total airframes; 55 Tu-95s and 17 Tu-160s) constitutes any serious threat to Russia's entire nuclear deterrent arsenal is fucking moronic. It is, in fact, just as fucking moronic as all the screaming from supposedly fully-grown adults who thought that there was literally any possibility of NATO going to war, much
less full scale war involving unrestrained full exchanges of intercontinental thermonuclear-armed ballistic missiles, because a stray missile killed two (2) farmers in Poland.
For the love of our Savior Christ,
stop spewing this peabrained bullshit.