Russia ready for N war: Putin

Moscow will use N weapons if sovereignty threatened, he says

FE Team | Published: March 13, 2024 22:41:19

MOSCOW, Mar 13 (Reuters): Russia remains in a state of combat readiness and is fully ready for a nuclear war, but not "everything is rushing to it" at present, President Vladimir Putin said in remarks published on Wednesday.
In an interview with state media, Putin, who launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine and is nearly certain to win the March 15 to 17 presidential election, said Russia would be ready to use nuclear weapons if its sovereignty was threatened.
"From a military-technical point of view, we are, of course, ready," Putin told Rossiya-1 television and news agency RIA in response to a question whether the country was really ready for a nuclear war.
He said the United States understands that if it deploys American troops on Russian territory - or to Ukraine - Russia would treat the move as an intervention.
"(In the United States) there are enough specialists in the field of Russian-American relations and in the field of strategic restraint," Putin said.
"Therefore, I don't think that here everything is rushing to it (nuclear confrontation), but we are ready for this."
He reiterated that the use of nuclear weapons was spelled out in the Kremlin's nuclear doctrine, its policy setting out the circumstances in which Russia might use its weapons.