Nuclear Weapons
Russia reasserts right to use nuclear weapons in
Ukraine
The Kremlin again raised the spectre of the use of
nuclear weapons in the war with Ukraine as Russian forces struggled to hold a
key city in the south the country.
Sat 26 Mar
2022
Dmitry
Medvedev, a former Russian president who is deputy chairman of the country’s
security council, said Moscow could strike against an enemy that only used
conventional weapons while Vladimir Putin’s defence minster claimed nuclear
“readiness” was a priority.
The
comments on Saturday prompted Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, in an
appearance by video link at Qatar’s Doha Forum to warn that Moscow was a direct
threat to the world.
“Russia is
deliberating bragging they can destroy with nuclear weapons, not only a certain
country but the entire planet,” Zelenskiy said.
Putin
established the nuclear threat at the start of the war, warning that western
intervention would reap “consequences you have never seen”.
Western
officials have said the threats may be simply an attempt to divert attention
from the failure of Putin’s forces to secure a swift occupation of the
Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, and to make advances in other key areas of the
country.
An adviser
to Ukraine’s defence ministry, Markian Lubkivskyi, claimed on Saturday that
Russia would soon lose control of the southern city of Kherson, the first major
centre to fall to the Kremlin since the war began on February 24th.
He said: “I
believe that today the city will be fully under the control of Ukrainian armed
forces. We have finished in the last two days the operation in the Kyiv region
so other armed forces are now focused on the southern part trying to get free
Kherson and some other Ukrainian cities.”
Russia has
approximately 6,000 nuclear warheads - the largest stockpile of nuclear weapons
in the world. In an interview on Saturday, Medvedev said Russia’s nuclear
doctrine did not require an enemy state to use such weapons first.
He said:
“We have a special document on nuclear deterrence. This document clearly
indicates the grounds on which the Russian Federation is entitled to use
nuclear weapons. There are a few of them, let me remind them to you:
“Number one
is the situation, when Russia is struck by a nuclear missile. The second case
is any use of other nuclear weapons against Russia or its allies.
“The third
is an attack on a critical infrastructure that will have paralysed our nuclear
deterrent forces.
“And the
fourth case is when an act of aggression is committed against Russia and its
allies, which jeopardised the existence of the country itself, even without the
use of nuclear weapons, that is, with the use of conventional weapons.”
Medvedev
added that there was a “determination to defend the independence, sovereignty
of our country, not to give anyone a reason to doubt even the slightest that we
are ready to give a worthy response to any infringement on our country, on its
independence”.
Russia’s
defence minister, Sergei Shoigu, who had not been seen for 12 days before a
brief appearance on Friday and an address to his generals on Saturday, also
spoke about the nuclear threat contained within Russia’s arsenal.
In a video,
uploaded on social media by the Russian defence ministry, Shoigu said he had
discussed issues related to the military budget and defence orders with the
finance ministry.
He said:
“We continue ahead-of-schedule delivery of weaponry and equipment by means of
credits. The priorities are long-range, high-precision weapons, aircraft
equipment and maintenance of engagement readiness of strategic nuclear forces.”
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