Senior Russian national security official Dmitry Medvedev has issued a dire nuclear warning and threat aimed at Ukraine and its Western backers (though certainly not for the first time).
He said in a Sunday Telegram post that Russia could be forced to mount nuclear attack if Ukraine’s counteroffensive succeeds. In effect it is to say that if Ukraine “wins”, nukes would be deployed. This would happen in the scenario of “part of our land being taken away,” he said.
“Just imagine that the offensive… in tandem with NATO, succeeded and ended up with part of our land being taken away. Then we would have to use nuclear weapons by virtue of the stipulations of the Russian Presidential Decree,” the former president and now deputy chairman of Russia’s Security Council asserted, which is being widely cited in Western press reports.
“There simply wouldn’t be any other solution,” he added. “Our enemies should pray to our fighters that they do not allow the world to go up in nuclear flames.”
It remains a little ambiguous over whether Medvedev was primarily referencing Russian territory proper within its national borders “being taken away”, or if this was a reference to the four regions of eastern/southern Ukraine, as well as Crimea, which have been declared absorbed into the Russian Federation as of last year.
Putin and top Russian officials had previously asserted that Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia would now be defended as de facto Russian territory under the law. Medvedev appears to be reasserting that even if this territory comes under ‘existential threat’ of being taken by Kiev and NATO, the ‘nuclear option’ would be firmly ‘on the table’.
Read moreMedvedev Says Russia Could Use Nuclear Weapon If Ukraine Offensive Wins