Thursday, January 19, 2023 | 9:45 a.m.
Former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said on Thursday that “the defeat of a nuclear power in a conventional war can trigger a nuclear war,” referring to Russia’s military campaign in Ukraine.
In a post on the Telegram messaging app about NATO’s support for the Ukrainian army, Medvedev said: “Nuclear powers have never lost major conflicts on which their fate depends.”
The former Russian president made the remarks on the eve of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group meeting at the US Ramstein airbase in Germany, where kyiv’s partners plan to announce major new military aid that will include more weapons. and ammunition, in addition to armored vehicles and, as the government of Volodimir Zelensky hopes, modern tanks.
For his part, the Kremlin spokesman warned Thursday of an escalation in Ukraine if the West provides it with more weapons capable of hitting Russia. “Potentially this is extremely dangerous, it will mean taking the conflict to a whole new level, which of course will not bode well from a global and pan-European security point of view,” spokesman Dmitri Peskov told reporters. .
Medvedev continued on his Telegram channel: “Tomorrow, at NATO’s Ramstein base, top military leaders will discuss new tactics and strategies, as well as supply Ukraine with new heavy weapons and attack systems. And this will be right after the Davos Forum, where belated revelers repeated like a mantra: to achieve peace, Russia must lose.
“And it never occurs to any of these wretches to draw the following elementary conclusion from this: the defeat of a nuclear power in a conventional war can cause the outbreak of a nuclear war,” stressed the vice president of the Security Council, one of the advisers of Putin who often raises warmongering rhetoric, after years of being considered a moderate.
“But this should be obvious to anyone. Even for a Western politician who has retained at least some trace of intelligence, ”she insists.
Russia has the world’s largest arsenal of nuclear weapons, with around 6,000 warheads, experts say. Together, Russia and the United States possess about 90% of the world’s nuclear warheads, enough to destroy the planet many times over.
In December, the United States warned that Moscow was expanding and modernizing its nuclear arsenal. “As the Kremlin continues its cruel and unprovoked war against Ukraine, the whole world has watched Putin engage in deeply irresponsible nuclear saber rattling,” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said.
Vladimir Putin has repeatedly suggested that he could use such weapons in his war against Ukraine. In September, he warned the West that he was not lying when he said that he was willing to use nuclear weapons to defend Russia. On September 30, he said that the United States had created a precedent by dropping two atomic bombs on Japan in 1945.
