Russian soldiers opened fire on a TV tower near the memorial complex in Kyiv.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Wednesday that if a third world war did happen, it would involve nuclear weapons and would be devastating, news agency Reuters reported.
Lavrov has said Russia, which launched a special military operation against Ukraine last week, faces a “real threat” if Kyiv acquires a nuclear weapon.
Russia stepped up attacks on overcrowded Ukrainian cities and on the seventh day of the war a long convoy of Russian tanks and other vehicles slowly marched towards the capital of Kyiv.
Notably, Russia has already put its nuclear deterrent on high alert, in the midst of a barrage of Western retaliation over Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine, which does not have nuclear weapons.
Moscow has the world’s largest arsenal of nuclear weapons and a large stockpile of ballistic missiles that form the backbone of the country’s deterrence forces. President Vladimir Putin said he was putting the country’s nuclear forces on high alert as Western countries are taking “unfriendly” measures against his country in the wake of a military operation in Ukraine.
Although the US declined to say whether the world’s largest nuclear forces were put on high alert, the country is closely monitoring developments. The United States has a very large and sophisticated nuclear stockpile. In addition, NATO partners France and the UK have their own advanced nuclear capabilities. Other NATO states such as Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Turkey host US nuclear weapons on their territory.
No country has used nuclear weapons since World War II, when US President Harry Truman dropped the bombs on Japan in Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9 respectively. About two lakh people were killed in the two bombings, most of them civilians. , and remains the only use of nuclear weapons in armed conflict.
Nuclear weapons are not the only intangible tools intended to deter aggression and maintain stability. As countries modernize and expand their nuclear weapons arsenals, experts around the world have been warning that nuclear weapons are being viewed as “usable” by political and military leaders who use them. .
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