- Putin said that no one in the world in their right mind would use nuclear weapons against Russia
President Vladimir Putin has threatened the West with total nuclear destruction leaving ‘no chance of survival’ in the event of a strike on Russia.
In a ranting anti-US speech, the dictator said his powerful ‘Satan-2’ and ‘Flying Chernobyl‘ missiles are ready for deployment in an ominous doomsday warning.
Putin told a conference in Sochi: ‘From the moment the launch of missiles is detected, no matter where it comes from – from any point of the world ocean or from any territory – such a number, so many hundreds of our missiles appear in the air in a retaliatory strike that there is no chance of survival there will be no single enemy left, and in several directions at once.’
The West has not threatened a first strike on Moscow and it is only his officials and army of propagandists who have talked up the use of nuclear weapons in the Ukraine conflict.
Putin asked the West to understand that threats against Russia are ‘absolutely unacceptable for any potential aggressor’.
He claimed Russia had ‘practically finished work on the modern strategic weapons that I have been talking about and I announced a few years ago’.
He also repeated that Russia may withdraw from the nuclear test ban treaty.
This could see Putin unilaterally testing major weapons, likely in the Arctic, as demanded by many of his supporters.
Recent reports suggested that the West suspected a new test in the Arctic on Burevestnik – a super powerful missile that can fly for days or weeks at a time powered by its own on-board nuclear reactor.
In recent days and weeks, Western spy planes have made regular flights towards Novaya Zemlya in the Arctic, amid suspicions of a test.
Putin boasted two days ahead of his 71st birthday: ‘The last successful test of the Burevestnik, a global-range cruise missile with a nuclear installation, a nuclear propulsion system, has been carried out.’
He also claimed: ‘We have actually finished work on Sarmat [Satan-2] on the super-heavy missile…’
This ‘unstoppable’ 15,880mph Armageddon intercontinental missile system is the size of a 14-storey tower block.
‘We just need to finish some of the procedures in a purely administrative and bureaucratic way and move on to mass production and putting them on combat duty,’ said Putin.
‘And we will do this in the near future.’
Yet this directly contradicted the words of his space agency chief who said on September 1 that a 208-tonne Satan-2 ‘has been put on combat duty’.
He questioned what right the United States had to lecture any other country and argued that the nation considered itself the only arbiter of truth on the planet.
The Russian leader added that the conflict in Ukraine was ‘not a territorial’ one and that Moscow has ‘no interests from the point of view of conquering some territories’.
He claimed that Ukraine has lost more than 90,000 troops since the start of its counter-offensive in early June and also said that Kyiv has lost 557 tanks and around 1,900 armoured vehicles.
Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 unleashed a war that has devastated swathes of eastern and southern Ukraine, killed or injured hundreds of thousands of men and triggered the biggest rupture in Russia’s ties with the West for six decades.
The West casts the war as Moscow’s biggest strategic blunder since the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and Western leaders say they want to defeat Russia on the battlefields of Ukraine.
A Ukrainian counter-offensive has so far failed to yield major territorial success.
Putin, though, presents the war as part of a much bigger struggle with the United States which the Kremlin elite says aims to cleave Russia apart, grab its vast natural resources and then turn to settling scores with China.
The speech came as a Russian rocket struck a village cafe and store in eastern Ukraine today, killing at least 50 civilians in one of the deadliest attacks in months, according to President Volodymyr Zelensky and other top officials in Kyiv.