Putin’s nuclear threats portend real danger – Biden

United States President Joe Biden has warned that threats by Russian President Vladimir Putin to use nuclear weapons in the war with Ukraine are real and could lead to “Armageddon.”

Biden, who described the threats as the biggest since the Cuban Missile Crisis, said the U.S. is trying to figure out Putin’s off-ramp from the war.

 “He is not joking when he talks about potential use of tactical nuclear weapons or biological and chemical weapons, because his military is, you might say, significantly underperforming. 

 “For the first time since the Cuban Missile Crisis, we have a direct threat to the use of nuclear weapons, if in fact things continue down the path they’d been going,” Biden said at a fundraiser in New York on Thursday.

“I don’t think there’s any such thing as the ability to easily use tactical nuclear weapons and not end up with Armageddon.

Also Read: Russia already has nuclear weapons in the Baltic region

 “We have not faced the prospect of Armageddon since Kennedy and the Cuban missile crisis,” Biden added.

In the 1962 crisis, the United States under President John Kennedy and Soviet Union under its leader, Nikita Khrushchev, came close to the use of nuclear weapons over the presence of Soviet missiles in Cuba.

Putin, who marks his 70th birthday on Friday, has warned he would use all means necessary, including Russia’s nuclear arsenal, to protest Russian soil, which he now says includes four Ukrainian regions he annexed.

In remarks to Australia’s Lowy Institute, Zelenskiy said NATO should launch preventive strikes on Russia to preclude its use of nuclear weapons.

Rrports say Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov denounced the comments as “an appeal to start yet another world war with unpredictable, monstrous consequences”.

Zainab Sa’id