KYIV: US President Joe Biden said the world is facing nuclear “Armageddon”, warning that Vladimir Putin may use his atomic arsenal as Russian troops struggle against a Ukrainian counteroffensive.
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 “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 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.
Russian-installed officials have renewed a call for residents to remain calm, with deputy pro-Moscow leader Kirill Stremousov saying Kremlin forces were holding back the advance.
But the Kremlin has pushed on—Russian missiles struck the central industrial city of Zaporizhzhia early on Thursday, killing several civilians. Rescue workers clawed through the rubble with their bare hands searching for survivors, AFP journalists saw.
Addressing a meeting in Prague of European heads of state, Zelensky called on Western capitals to supply his army with more weapons “to punish the aggressor”.
Ukraine must fend off Moscow’s invasion “so that Russian tanks do not advance on Warsaw or again on Prague”, he said.
The EU imposed its latest round of sanctions on Russia, expanding bans on trade and individuals over Moscow’s formal annexation last Friday of four Ukrainian regions.
The Russian foreign ministry said it had summoned the French ambassador to Moscow, pointing to the “threats posed” by the increased military support Paris offered to Kyiv.
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba accused Russian forces of “deliberately striking civilians to sow fear”.
In Russia, opposition figure Vladimir Kara-Murza—jailed in April for denouncing the war—has been charged with high treason, his lawyer told the TASS news agency.
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