President Vladimir Putin warned the West on Wednesday that Russia was technically ready for nuclear war and that if the U.S. sent troops to Ukraine it would be considered a significant escalation of the war.
Putin, speaking just days before a March 15-17 election which is certain to give him another six years in power, said the nuclear war scenario was not “rushing” up and he saw no need for the use of nuclear weapons in Ukraine.
“From a military-technical point of view, we are, of course, ready,” Putin, 71, told Rossiya-1 television and news agency RIA in response to a question whether the country was really ready for a nuclear war.
Putin said the U.S. understood that if it deployed American troops on Russian territory – or to Ukraine – Russia would treat the move as an intervention.
“(In the United States) there are enough specialists in the field of Russian-American relations and in the field of strategic restraint,” Putin said.
“Therefore, I don’t think that here everything is rushing to it (nuclear confrontation), but we are ready for this.”
The war in Ukraine has triggered the deepest crisis in Russia’s relations with the West since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis and Putin has warned several times that the West risks provoking a nuclear war if it sends troops to fight in Ukraine, Reuters reported.
Putin sent tens of thousands of troops into Ukraine in February 2022, triggering full-scale war after eight years of conflict in eastern Ukraine between Ukrainian forces on one side and pro-Russian Ukrainians and Russian proxies on the other.
Putin, Russia’s ultimate decision maker on nuclear weapons, reiterated that the use of nuclear weapons was spelled out in the Kremlin’s nuclear doctrine, its policy setting out the circumstances in which Russia might use its weapons.
“Weapons exist in order to use them,” Putin said. “We have our own principles.”
Russia and the United States are by far the largest nuclear powers, controlling more than 90% of the world’s nuclear weapons.