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Tag: nuclear weapons

  • Russia begins a tactical nuclear weapons drill

    Russia begins a tactical nuclear weapons drill

    Russian military has begun practicing how to use small nuclear weapons, the Defence Ministry said on Tuesday.

    President Putin told his soldiers to practice earlier this month. Moscow says that Western officials made strong statements that made Russia feel less safe.

    The Foreign Ministry of Russia mentioned that the French President and the British Foreign Secretary are talking about sending troops and using weapons to fight Russia in Ukraine.

    Security experts believe that the exercise is a way for Putin to send a warning to the West and prevent them from getting more involved in the war in Ukraine. The West has given weapons and information to Kyiv, but has not sent soldiers.

    The military said they used Iskander and Kinzhal missiles in the first part of the exercise.

    It is meant to make sure that the units and equipment are ready to use non-strategic nuclear weapons to protect Russia from threats made by Western officials.

    The practice involves the use of missiles in the southern part of Russia, close to Ukraine. This area also includes parts of Ukraine that are under Russia’s control.

    Belarus and Russia both said they will be part of the military exercises. Russia said they will be using tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus last year.

    Smaller nuclear weapons are not as strong as the big ones that can destroy entire cities, but they still have a lot of power to cause a lot of damage.

  • Kim Jong-un inspects Russian warships, missiles, and bombers with nuclear weapons

    Kim Jong-un inspects Russian warships, missiles, and bombers with nuclear weapons

    Russia’s ambassador to North Korea, Alexander Matsegora, told reporters that Kim’s programme was ‘very intense’ and that it was not yet clear how long he would remain in Russia, state news agency RIA reported.

    It also quoted Oleg Kozhemyako, governor of Vladivostok’s Primorye region, as saying he would have talks with Kim on Sunday on cooperation in sport, tourism and culture.

    After the aircraft and missiles, Kim inspected the Russian Pacific Fleet’s frigate ‘Marshal Shaposhnikov’ in Vladivostok and saw a demonstration of modern missile control systems, RIA said.

    South Korea and the United States said on Friday that military cooperation between North Korea and Russia would violate UN sanctions against Pyongyang and that the allies would ensure there was a price to pay.

    Russia has gone out of its way to publicise Kim’s visit and drop repeated hints about the prospect of military cooperation with North Korea, which was formed in 1948 with the backing of the Soviet Union.

    For Putin, who says Moscow is locked in an existential battle with the West over Ukraine, courting Kim allows him to needle Washington and its Asian allies while potentially securing a deep supply of artillery for the Ukraine war.

    Washington has accused North Korea of providing arms to Russia, which has the world’s biggest store of nuclear warheads, but it is unclear whether any deliveries have been made.

    Kim on Friday inspected a Russian fighter jet factory that is under Western sanctions.

    He and Putin discussed military matters, the war in Ukraine and deepening cooperation when they met on Wednesday.

    Putin told reporters Russia was ‘not going to violate anything’, but would keep developing relations with North Korea.

    Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters there had not been a plan to sign any formal agreements during the visit.

    Russian diplomats said Washington had no right to lecture Moscow after the United States had bolstered its allies across the world, including with a visit of a US nuclear-armed ballistic missile submarine to South Korea in July.

    While in Vladivostok, Kim watched the first act of the ballet ‘Sleeping Beauty’, staged by St Petersburg’s Mariinsky theatre, the RIA news agency reported. 

  • Russia may deploy nuclear weapons if Ukraine’s retaliation is successful – Medvedev

    Russia may deploy nuclear weapons if Ukraine’s retaliation is successful – Medvedev

    Senior Russian official Dmitry Medvedev warned on Sunday that if Ukraine’s counteroffensive is successful, Russia may be obliged to deploy nuclear weapons. This is the latest nuclear threat issued by President Vladimir Putin’s top backer during Moscow’s invasion.

    Imagine for a moment suppose the NATO-supported offensive was successful and a portion of our land was captured. The Russian Presidential Decree’s provisions would therefore force us to use nuclear weapons, stated Medvedev, the deputy head of the Russian Security Council, in a Telegram post.

    The former Russian leader continued, “There would just be no other way out.” “Our adversaries should beg our warriors to prevent the world from engulfing in nuclear conflagration.”

    Throughout Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine, Medvedev, the Russian president from 2008 to 2012, has adopted a bellicose demeanour and frequently invoked the possibility of nuclear war.

    He issued a nuclear warning last April should Sweden and Finland join NATO. Stockholm’s path to NATO membership was eased earlier this month after Turkey abandoned its objections, while Helsinki joined the defence alliance later that month.

    In September, Medvedev claimed that Russia might protect Ukrainian territories that had been annexed by it with strategic nuclear weapons.

    And in January, as NATO members discussed sending more weaponry to Ukraine, Medvedev warned that a loss for Russia in the fight may spark a nuclear exchange.

    In January, Medvedev posted on Telegram that “the loss of a nuclear power in a conventional war can provoke the outbreak of a nuclear war.” “Nuclear powers don’t lose significant battles in which their future is at stake.

    “Anyone should understand this. even to a Western politician with even a modicum of competence.

    In a rare admission from a senior Russian official, Medvedev said in his speech on Sunday that Russia may eventually lose the war after nearly 18 months of attrition.

    They also occurred just after the Russian Defence Ministry accused Kiev of launching a drone attack on Moscow. A corporate and shopping complex in the western part of the Russian capital was damaged, the ministry reported, despite the fact that three drones were intercepted on Sunday.

    Both privately and publicly, notably during the previous UN General Assembly, the United States has already warned Russia against using nuclear weapons in Ukraine.

    Putin said last month that Russia had transferred a first batch of tactical nuclear weapons to Belarus, where they had been stationed for “deterrence.”

    Putin stated at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum that Belarus would get the remaining tactical nuclear weapons from Russia “by the end of the summer or by the end of the year.”

    According to the US Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA), there is “no reason to doubt” Putin’s assertion that Belarus has nuclear weapons.

    However, Matthew Miller, a spokesman for the US State Department, stated at the time that the US had “not seen any reason to adjust our own nuclear posture nor any indication Russia is preparing to use a nuclear weapon.”

    Alexander Lukashenko, the president of Belarus, declared last month that he would use the Russian tactical nuclear weapons stationed on Belarusian land without “hesitation” in the event of assault.

    Senior DIA officials, however, asserted that they did not think Lukashenko would be in charge of the arsenal. Russian authority over it would likely be total, according to the officials.

    The Federation of American Scientists estimates that Russia possesses 4,477 deployed and reserve nuclear warheads, including around 1,900 tactical nuclear weapons.

  • Lunatic dictator now controls Russian nuclear weapons – Exiled Belarus activist

    Lunatic dictator now controls Russian nuclear weapons – Exiled Belarus activist

    The leader of the exiled Belarusian opposition has warned of the risk of Russia giving nuclear weapons to “a crazy dictator.”

    In an interview with the BBC in Warsaw, Poland, Svetlana Tikhanovskaya made the disparaging remarks about Alexander Lukashenko, the president of Belarus.

    She charged that the west had been “staying silent” over the first nuclear weapon deployment outside of Russia since the fall of the USSR in 1991.

    Given that Belarus served as the launchpad for Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in February, Lukashenko is regarded as a crucial friend by Russia.

    Lukashenko announced the first ‘missiles and bombs’ had arrived in the country on Russian state television, and when the presenter asked him to confirm if Belarus had received weapons sooner than expected, he replied: ‘Not all of them. Gradually.’

    He claimed the Russian bombs were ‘three times more powerful’ than those dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima in Japan during World War II.

    Lukashenko also said he hadn’t simply asked Putin for the weapons – ‘I demanded them back,’ he said, claiming he needed them to protect against external aggression.

    Belarus, like Ukraine and Kazakhstan, gave up its nuclear arsenal in the 1990s in return for security guarantees from post-Soviet Russia and the west.

    There isn’t any proof that nuclear weapons have been delivered to Belarus yet, but if they are, it marks a significant reversal.

    Moscow announced the move in March and says it will retain control of the missiles.

    ‘This deployment creates no new threat to Nato countries, so they don’t take it seriously,’ Ms Tikhanovskaya argued, believing that western countries see no difference between a missile fired from Russia or from Belarus.

    ‘But Belarus is our country and we don’t want nuclear weapons.

    ‘This is like the last step to keeping our independence. And they [in the west] are staying silent about that.’

  • No indications Russia is preparing to use nuclear weapons: White House

    White House spokesman, the US does not perceive any indications that Russia is getting ready to use nuclear weapons.

    Spokesman John Kirby declared: “We have been clear from the beginning that Russia’s comments about the potential use of nuclear weapons are deeply concerning, and we take them seriously.”

    “We continue to monitor this as best we can, and we see no indications that Russia is making preparations for such use.”

    Kirby’s remarks came after the New York Times newspaper reported earlier on Wednesday that senior Russian military leaders had recently held discussions about when and how Moscow might deploy a tactical nuclear weapon in Ukraine, citing multiple unnamed US officials.

     

  • Nuclear threat at its highest level since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, says Biden

    US President Joe Biden, says the risk of a nuclear “Armageddon” is higher than it has ever been since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.

    Vladimir Putin’s threat to use tactical nuclear weapons after suffering setbacks in Ukraine, according to Mr. Biden, was “not joking.”

    The US was “trying to figure out” Mr Putin’s way out of the war, he added.

    The US and the EU have previously said Mr Putin’s nuclear sabre-rattling should be taken seriously.

    However, the US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan last week said that, despite Moscow’s nuclear hints, the US had seen no signs that Russia was imminently preparing to use a nuclear weapon.

    Ukraine has been retaking territory occupied by Russia, including in the four regions Russia illegally annexed recently.

    For several months US officials have been warning that Russia could resort to the use of weapons of mass destruction if it suffers setbacks on the battlefield.

    President Biden said the reason the Russian leader had not been “not joking” when he talked about using tactical nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons – “because his military is, you might say, significantly underperforming”.

    “For the first time since the Cuban Missile Crisis, we have a direct threat to the use of nuclear weapons, if in fact, things continue down the path they’d been going,” Mr Biden told fellow Democrats.

    “We have not faced the prospect of Armageddon since Kennedy and the Cuban Missile Crisis.”

    In 1962, the US and the Soviet Union – under President John F Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev – came close to a nuclear showdown over the deployment of Russian nuclear weapons in Cuba.

    The confrontation is considered by many experts to be the closest the world has ever come to full-scale nuclear war.

    During a speech last Friday, President Putin said the US had created a “precedent” by using nuclear weapons against Japan at the end of World War Two – a comment that would not have gone unnoticed by Western governments, our Russia editor Steve Rosenberg points out.

    Mr Putin has also threatened to use every means at his disposal to protect Russian territory.

    Even as Mr Putin signed the final papers formally annexing four regions of Ukraine – Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson – Kyiv’s forces were advancing inside those areas he had claimed.

    Hundreds of thousands of men have been fleeing Russia rather than wait to be drafted to fight in Ukraine.

    Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky has previously dismissed Moscow’s nuclear threats as a “constant narrative of Russian officials and propagandists”.

    Paul Stronski, of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told the BBC that Russia’s “destabilising rhetoric” is aimed at deterring the West.

    There has also been some pushback against Moscow’s nuclear threats in Russia itself. An editorial in the country’s mainstream Nezavisimaya Gazeta newspaper was heavily critical of “senior Russian officials” for “talking about the nuclear button”.

    “To allow, in thoughts and words, the possibility of a nuclear conflict is a sure step to allowing it in reality.”

    Russia’s foreign ministry spokeswoman told reporters on Thursday that Moscow had not changed its position that nuclear war “must never be waged”.

    Mr Biden’s comments came at the New York home of James Murdoch, son of media mogul Rupert Murdoch, during a Democratic fundraising event.

  • Pro-Putin Russian MP threatens: A nuclear attack will convert the UK into a “Martian desert in three minutes flat”

    Monday’s nonstop coverage of the Queen’s funeral meant that several other stories, including the conflict in Ukraine, received less attention than they would have.

    The most recent episode of the pro-Kremlin television show 60 Minutes gave Russian State Duma member and retired major general Andrey Gurulyov the chance to make even more grave nuclear assault threats against the UK and Germany.

    Referring to US President Joe Biden’s warning to Russia over the use of nuclear weapons in Ukraine, the pro-Putin lawmaker said: “We may use them, but definitely not in Ukraine.”

    Having suggested Moscow could target Berlin with a nuclear strike, he goes on to discuss the likely US response in the event of an attack on the UK.

    Referring to NATO’s Article 5, which states that an attack on any member of the bloc is considered an act of violence against all the allies, he says: “If we turn the British Isles into a Martian desert in three minutes flat, using tactical nuclear weapons, not strategic ones, they could use Article 5, but for whom?

    “A non-existent country, turned into a Martian desert? They won’t respond. We shouldn’t be afraid of that.”

    Host Olga Skabeeva then joked: “We should have done it today, all the best people are there for the funeral.”

    Notorious for its frequently misleading information about the war in Ukraine, 60 Minutes is routinely used as a vehicle for pro-Russian propaganda.