Lhe United States has asked Russia through private channels to end its rhetoric about the nuclear threat in the war in Ukraine, a weapon whose use would have, Washington warns, “catastrophic” consequences. “We have been very clear with the Russians, publicly and privately, to stop talking about nuclear weapons,” US Foreign Minister Antony Blinken said in an interview with CBS News broadcast Sunday. .
“It is very important that Moscow hears us and knows that the consequences would be horrible. And we have been very clear about this,” said the Secretary of State. “Any use of nuclear weapons would have catastrophic effects for the country that uses them, of course, but also for many others. »
A little earlier, the national security adviser of the White House had already warned of the “catastrophic” consequences in the event of the use of nuclear weapons by Moscow. “We have the ability to speak directly at a high level (to the Russians), to tell them clearly what our message is and to hear theirs,” Jake Sullivan also said on NBC. “This has happened frequently in recent months, it has even happened in recent days,” he said, without however wanting to specify the exact nature of the communication channels used to “protect them”.
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A “severe” American response
On Wednesday, in a televised speech, Vladimir Putin alluded to the atomic bomb, saying he was ready to use “all means” in his arsenal against the West, which he accused of wanting to “destroy” Russia. “It’s not a bluff,” also assured the Russian president. Washington has already issued several warnings, with an increasingly harsh vocabulary, against a possible recourse to nuclear weapons by Moscow.
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Questioned on September 16, before the Russian president implicitly waved this threat, Joe Biden had sent this message: “Don’t do it. Don’t. Don’t. You would change the face of war in a way not seen since World War II. He had warned that the American response would be “consequent”, but without further details.
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Washington had previously said it took this threat “seriously” and promised a “severe” response. Russia and the United States are the greatest nuclear powers in the world. Russian military doctrine allows the use of tactical nuclear weapons on the battlefield to force an enemy to retreat.
Putin “wants to scare the whole world”
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, invited at a press conference on Saturday at the United Nations to clarify President Putin’s statements, replied that the Moscow doctrine was “a public document”. But Russian military doctrine also provides for the possibility of resorting to nuclear strikes if territories considered its own by Moscow are attacked, which could soon be the case with the Ukrainian regions in which annexation referendums have been taking place since Friday.
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These elections, described as “simulacra” without legal value by kyiv and its Western allies, are taking place in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, which form the Donbass mining basin, in eastern Ukraine, as well as in the occupied areas of Kherson and Zaporizhia, in the south of the country. For his part, Volodymyr Zelensky said on CBS that he takes his Russian counterpart’s threats very seriously, based on the strikes he accuses Moscow of having committed near the Zaporizhia nuclear power plant, the largest in Europe.
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“So he wants to scare the whole world,” argued the Ukrainian president. “These are the first steps in his nuclear blackmail. I don’t think he’s bluffing. The nuclear weapon has been used twice in history, in 1945 when the United States destroyed the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing more than 200,000 people. Imperial Japan surrendered days later, ending World War II.