……..Puts Russia Nuclear Forces On High Alert
As the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), also called the North Atlantic Alliance, supported by the European Union (EU) continued to press economic sanctions against Russia, President Vladimir Putin has put the country’s nuclear forces on high alert.
Reuters said that Putin has ordered Russia’s military to put its deterrence forces, which include nuclear weapons, on “special alert”. He told defence chiefs it was because of “aggressive statements” by the Wes
Putin’s words since the invasion of Ukraine a few days ago were widely interpreted as signaling a threat to use nuclear weapons if the West stood in his way.
The warning became sharper on Sunday when he ordered the Russian defence minister and the chief of the military’s general staff to put the nuclear deterrent forces on a “special regime of combat duty”. But the US was said to have immediately condemned the Russian president’s decision, calling it an “unacceptable escalation”.
The invasion has so far seen the EU, the UK, and the U.S. and Canada close their skies to Russian aircraft and impose a series of harsh sanctions targeting Russia’s financial industry, up to and including the cutoff of several Russian banks from the SWIFT system.
The EU has sent weapons to Ukraine Reuters reported, saying Brussels was going to send some $507 million worth of weaponry to Ukraine too. The economic sanctions appear to be biting Russia already.
The US permanent representative to the United Nations said Mr. Putin’s nuclear deterrent order showed he was escalating the Ukraine conflict in an unacceptable manner, while the White House said Russia had not been under threat from NATO at any point.
Experts say moving to alert status, which is what Putin has done, likely makes it easier to launch weapons more quickly. But it does not mean there is a current intent to use them.
Russia has the largest stockpile of nuclear weapons in the world but also knows that NATO has enough to destroy Russia if they were used.
But Vladimir Putin’s aim is likely to try to deter NATO support for Ukraine by creating fears over how far he is willing to go – and creating ambiguity over what kind of support for Ukraine he would consider to be too much.
UK Defence Secretary said that the heightened alert was an attempt by the Kremlin to remind the world that it had a nuclear deterrent and to distract from what was going wrong on the ground in Ukraine.
“We will not do anything to escalate in that area… but at the moment this is a battle of rhetoric that President Putin is deploying,” he said. Wallace added that Mr. Putin knew that “anything involving a nuclear weapon has a greater or equal response from the West. We are afraid that Russia is not going to stop in Ukraine,” the EU’s foreign policy chief Josep Borell said, adding that Putin’s latest move was clearly a threat of a nuclear attack.
The U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, recommended “Russia to tone down this dangerous rhetoric regarding nuclear weapons. This is really a pattern that we’ve seen from President Putin through the course of this conflict, which is manufacturing threats that don’t exist in order to justify further aggression — and the global community and the American people should look at it through that prism,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki told CNN.
By Chibisi Ohakah, Abuja
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