The Kremlin’s propaganda encourages the specter of an atomic hecatomb in the Old Continent and that “no one would survive”
To London it would be about 202 seconds. To Paris, 200 and to Berlin, 106. That is the approximate time it would take Russia to launch nuclear attacks on the capitals of the United Kingdom, France and Germany. Tensions are rising internationally in a conflict that was already quite tense and is worsening with a warning of a possible third world war. The program ’60 minutes’ of the first Russian public television network has simulated how its president, Vladimir Putin, could launch a nuclear attack in Europe that would take less than four minutes and that no one would “survive”, the newspaper published this Sunday. British ‘Daily Mail’.
This political television program is one of the most watched programs in Russia. In full debate, the presenters showed a map of the Old Continent in which they recreated nuclear missile launches from Kaliningrad, the Russian enclave between Poland, Lithuania and the Baltic Sea, towards London, Paris and Berlin. To the graph they added the time it would take for the projectiles to hit: 202, 200 and 106 seconds, respectively. Then other countries were mentioned that would take minutes to attack, such as Spain.
The debate arose after the latest statements by the British Armed Forces Minister, James Heappey, in which he described as “legitimate” that Ukraine attacked Russian soil. “A simil ‘Sarmat’ and the British Isles would no longer exist,” said one commentator, Alexei Zhuravlev, president of the far-right nationalist party that supports Putin in Parliament. “I’m serious about this,” he insisted, while another host added that the UK also has an arsenal of this caliber and that if such a war broke out, “no one would survive.”
Graphic of a hypothetical Russian nuclear attack on Europe. /
Repeated threat
This is not Zhuravlev’s first controversial comment. In December of last year he called for US Congressman Rubén Gallego to be kidnapped and jailed for his support in arming and training the kyiv Army. A month later he stated that Moscow should plant nuclear weapons in Cuba and Venezuela in response to NATO’s military aid to Ukraine and Georgia.
It is also not the first time that the idea of threatening Europe has arisen. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has repeatedly warned that arming Ukraine is an attack on the Kremlin. He also mentioned that if a third world war were to break out, it would be “nuclear and destructive.” Last week Putin tested his ‘Sarmat’ missiles – known as Satan II – and boasted that they could “pierce all modern defences” and be ready to attack the UK “in the autumn”.
In fact, on Saturday Moscow put into orbit a military satellite capable of launching up to three tons of payload into the troposphere, according to the Russian Defense Ministry. It should be noted that the Putin regime has the most nuclear warheads in the world, ahead of the US, in second position, according to a study by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientist. In total, it has 5,977 distributed in deployed, stored and defensive warheads.