Is Vladimir Putin preparing to use nuclear weapons against Ukraine?

Vladimir Putin has ordered Russia’s military to put its nuclear deterrence forces on “high alert”, ramping up fears that he could be prepared to deploy weapons of mass destruction in an effort to bring the war in Ukraine to a swift end. 

With the Kremlin facing “dogged” Ukrainian resistance and an “increasingly aggressive Western response” to its invasion, The Telegraph said that the move to ready atomic weapons could be an attempt to “avoid the humiliation” of withdrawing his troops without toppling President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s government in Kyiv.

The announcement does not mean that he is intending to use the weapons, but rather that they are put “into a special mode of combat service”, Putin said yesterday. The move is being made in response to the West’s “unfriendly steps”, he added.

Extreme measures

Russia has more than 1,500 warheads deployed and almost 3,000 in reserve, according to an assessment published in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists on Friday. 

The Kremlin has also “invested in a variety of ways to employ those warheads”, The Wall Street Journal said, “including land-based ballistic missiles that could reach the US, submarine-based missiles, and bombs and missiles that could be deployed from aircraft”.

Four days after Putin launched a three-pronged attack on Ukraine, “Russia’s advance has become bogged down and its troops repelled after fierce fighting in the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, and in Kharkiv, its second city”, The Telegraph reported.

Military analysts yesterday claimed that Russia had suffered its “worst day” since the outbreak of fighting, the paper added. Moscow “admitted for the first time on Sunday that it had suffered casualties but insisted Ukraine’s claims of 4,300 soldiers killed was inaccurate”.

As it becomes clear that “Putin’s assault on Ukraine has failed to yield the quick victories he had anticipated”, nations around the world have also moved to impose “unprecedented new measures” against Russia’s economy, The Guardian reported.

These sanctions have become “a form of economic war”, said the BBC’s economics editor Faisal Islam, and are “designed to push the whole of Russia in to as deep a recession as possible, with the added chaos of bank runs”.

Article source: https://www.theweek.co.uk/news/world-news/russia/955913/is-vladimir-putin-preparing-nuclear-weapons-ukraine