US President Joe Biden said Thursday the world is facing nuclear “Armageddon”, warning that Vladimir Putin may use his atomic arsenal as Russian troops struggle against a Ukrainian counteroffensive, IgbereTV reports
After Russia’s invasion eight months ago, Putin has made thinly veiled threats to use nuclear weapons if he feels he has run out of options in his bid to seize swaths of Ukrainian territory in the face of stiff resistance by Western-back Kyiv.
“We have not faced the prospect of Armageddon since Kennedy and the Cuban missile crisis” in 1962, Biden said Thursday in New York, adding that “we’re trying to figure out what is Putin’s off-ramp”.
While experts say any nuclear attacks would likely be relatively small, Biden warned that even a tactical strike in a limited area would still risk triggering a wider conflagration.
Putin is “not joking when he talks about the potential use of tactical nuclear weapons or biological or chemical weapons, because his military is, you might say, significantly underperforming,” he said.
Ukraine’s proclaimed wins in the southern region of Kherson are the latest in a series of Russian defeats undermining the Kremlin’s claim to have annexed around 20 percent of Ukraine.
“More than (500 square kilometres) have been liberated from Russian occupiers in the Kherson region alone” since the start of October, President Volodymyr Zelensky announced late Thursday in his nightly address.
The recaptured territory was home to dozens of towns and villages that had been occupied by Russian forces for months, southern army command spokeswoman Natalia Gumeniuk said.
Kherson, a region with an estimated pre-war population of around one million people, was captured early and easily by Moscow’s troops after their invasion launched on February 24.
