The Kremlin should advise Russians living abroad to evacuate potential nuclear attack targets, a hardline Vladimir Putin ally has argued.
Sergey Karaganov, a chairman at the Council of Foreign and Defence Policy, said that Russian ex-pats should be warned that they need to flee before any possible nuclear attack.
Karaganov claimed the nuclear attacks on Europe would be necessary to ‘break’ the West’s continued support for Ukraine and its military forces.
The Putin apologist was arguing that Russia needed to drastically escalate its rhetoric used around nuclear weapons as a deterrent for Western nations to ‘back down’ from supplying weapons and munitions to Ukraine.
He said if the escalation of rhetoric failed to do this, the Kremlin should start carrying out nuclear strikes across Europe.
‘This is a morally terrible choice – we use the weapons of God, dooming ourselves to severe spiritual losses.
‘But if this is not done, not only Russia may perish, but, most likely, the entire human civilisation will end,’ Karaganov wrote in an article published on Kremlin-linked website Global Affairs, entitled A Difficult But Necessary Decision.
He argued that there would be little likelihood the United States would retaliate with nuclear warheads in return because they would be too fearful of an attack on their own soil.
‘Only if there is a madman in the White House … will America decide on a strike to defend Europeans, incurring a response and sacrificing, say, Boston for, say, Poznan,’ he wrote.
It comes as Putin earlier this week threatened that the war in Ukraine could turn into a nuclear conflict sparking World War Three.
The despot warned ‘there will be no winners, including America’ as he threatened to escalate his invasion.
‘The United States pretends not to be afraid of an escalation of the conflict in Ukraine, but sane people there clearly do not want to take this to a Third World War,’ Putin said at a meeting with Russian war correspondents in Moscow on Tuesday.
‘In the event of a Third World War, there will be no winners, including America.’
Despite the increased rhetoric, Nato head Jens Stoltenberg said there were no signs that Russia was preparing to deploy nuclear weapons.
