Russia’s top diplomat has warned against “trying to fight to victory with a nuclear power” in a speech at the UN General Assembly on Saturday.
Sergei Lavrov’s address was packed with condemnations of what Russia sees as Western machinations in Ukraine and elsewhere — including inside the UN itself.
Three days after Russian President Vladimir Putin aired a shift in his country’s nuclear doctrine, foreign minister Mr Lavrov accused the West of using Ukraine — which Russia invaded in February 2022 — as a tool to try “to defeat” Moscow strategically.
He said: “I’m not going to talk about the senselessness and the danger of the very idea of trying to fight to victory with a nuclear power, which is what Russia is.”
The spectre of nuclear threats and confrontation has hung over the war in Ukraine since its start.
Shortly before the invasion, Mr Putin reminded the world that his country was “one of the most powerful nuclear states” and he put its nuclear forces on high alert shortly after.
On Wednesday, Mr Putin said that if attacked by any country supported by a nuclear-armed nation, Russia will consider that a joint attack.
He did not specify whether that would bring a nuclear response but he stressed that Russia could use nuclear weapons in response to a conventional assault that posed a “critical threat to our sovereignty”.
The US and the European Union called his statements “irresponsible”.
The new posture was seen as a message to the US and other Western countries as Ukraine seeks their go-ahead to strike Russia with longer-range weapons.
The Biden administration this week announced an additional 2.7 billion dollars (£2.01 billion) in military aid for Ukraine, but it does not include the type of long-range arms that Ukrainian officials are seeking, nor a green light to use such weapons to strike deep into Russia.
More than two-and-a-half years into the fighting, Russia is making slow but continual gains in Ukraine’s east.
Ukraine has repeatedly struck Russian territory with missiles and drones, and embarrassed Moscow with an audacious incursion by troops in a border region last month.
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