A warning has been issued over Vladimir Putin firing nuclear weapons as the Russian president’s forces advance on Avdiivka.
A leading Western think-tank said the war in Ukraine has dented Russia's confidence in its conventional forces and increased the importance to Moscow of non-strategic nuclear weapons (NSNWs) as a means of deterring and defeating NATO in a potential future conflict.
Monday’s report by the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) raised the question of whether Russia might look to fire a NSNW in the belief that the West lacks the resolve to deliver a nuclear response.
NSNWs are nuclear weapons with a range of up to 5,500 km, as opposed to longer-range ones that Russia or the US could use to strike each other’s homeland.
Meanwhile, a US war think tank, the Institute for the Study of War (ISW), reported Ukrainian military observer, Kostyantyn Mashovets, said Russian soldiers had advanced to the south and south-west of the eastern industrial town of Avdiivka, currently held by Ukraine.
Elsewhere, in his first visit to neighbouring Ukraine as prime minister, Poland’s Donald Tusk delivered a message of friendship to President Volodymyr Zelensky.
