Irrespective of the dip in form Russia forces might have suffered militarily, their threats are never to be taken with pinch of salt. Russia still remains one of the world’s most effective counter-insurgents.
No one is underestimating Putin’s nuclear threat in Ukraine, if anything, no one should. Understimate Putin at your own peril. Even though it is true that, so far, Ukrainian conventional forces and resistance groups have successfully mounted a stiff defense against Russia’s numerically superior forces.
If Putin’s nuclear threat is to happen, then it will leads to Armageddon. Even this threat has stirred response from U.S President, Joe Biden who knows fully well things that are at stake if Russia carries our their nuclear threat. Joe Biden has warned that Vladimir Putin is not joking about nuclear threat.
Speaking at a fundraiser in New York on Thursday night, Biden said Russia’s president was “not joking” about the “potential use of tactical nuclear weapons or biological or chemical weapons because his military is you might say significantly underperforming”.
“We have not faced the prospect of Armageddon since [President John] Kennedy and the Cuban missile crisis,” Biden said, adding that “we have a direct threat of the use of nuclear weapons if in fact things continue down the path they are going”.
Biden said he was trying to find a way for Putin to back down. “I’m trying to figure out: what is Putin’s off-ramp?” Biden said. “Where does he find a way out?”
Biden’s comments, at the home of James Murdoch, the media investor, reflected mounting anxiety in Washington and across Europe that Russia might be preparing to use nuclear weapons in the Ukraine war.
But Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary, told reporters on Friday that the president’s remarks were not based on any new intelligence and there was not any new information to suggest Russia would use nuclear weapons “imminently”.
In heavy response to the heavy threat Putin has made, Senior US officials have warned Russia would face “catastrophic consequences” if Moscow used nuclear weapons and said they had communicated what those would be in private to Russian officials.
The responses to the nuclear threat so far has already confirmed that no one is underestimating Putin’s nuclear threat.
“We take them seriously. But we are not being blackmailed by what he [Putin] said,” Ursula von der Leyen, the European commission president, said.
German chancellor Olaf Scholz said: “We need to be very clear. This would be unacceptable. It would be very dangerous for the entire world. No one should use nuclear weapons.”
The EU has agreed to train Ukrainian soldiers for the first time after Germany dropped its objections. Several EU countries already do so but this would be the first joint operation. It also levied new sanctions on Russia this week – they are pointers that Putin’s nuclear threat is not underestimated.
