Washington: The threat by Russian President Vladimir Putin to use nuclear weapons, according to US President Joe Biden, is the greatest such threat since the Cuban Missile Crisis.
According to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian forces are quickly retaking more land, particularly in the south of the nation.
The Russian president “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,” said Biden.
“For the first time since the Cuban Missile Crisis, we have a direct threat to the use of nuclear weapons, if, in fact, things continue down the path they’d been going,” Biden said on Thursday.
“We have not faced the prospect of Armageddon since Kennedy and the Cuban missile crisis,” he said.
In the 1962 crisis over the Soviet missiles in Cuba, President John F. Kennedy of the United States and Nikita Khrushchev of the Soviet Union came dangerously near to using nuclear weapons.
“I don’t think there’s any such thing as the ability to easily (use) a tactical nuclear weapon and not end up with Armageddon,” Biden said.
Putin, who marks his 70th birthday on Friday, has warned he would use all means necessary, including Russia’s nuclear arsenal, to protest Russian soil, which he now says includes four Ukrainian regions he annexed. – Agencies
