President Vladimir Putin has ordered Russian nuclear deterrent forces put on high alert.
Gatekeepers News reports that Putin on Sunday said leading NATO powers had made “aggressive statements” while imposing hard-hitting financial sanctions against Russia and himself.
The President, at a meeting with his top officials, ordered the defence minister and the chief of the military’s general staff to put the nuclear deterrent forces in a “special regime of combat duty”, raising the threat that the tensions could lead to the use of nuclear weapons.”
The Kremlin said it had successfully test-launched hypersonic and cruise missiles at sea and land-based targets. Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, an ally of Putin, also oversaw the military exercises.
The United States responded to Putin’s announcement, accusing the Russian leader of fabricating threats to justify “further aggression”.
“This is 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,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki said on ABC.
The American ambassador to the United Nations, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, has also condemned the move.
“It means that President Putin is continuing to escalate this war in a manner that is totally unacceptable,” Thomas-Greenfield said in an interview on CBS.
Meanwhile, the office of Ukraine’s president said a delegation would meet Russian officials near the Belarus border.
