Russia has announced its army held fresh nuclear drills under the supervision of President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday, October 29th.
Putin, who recently called for changes to Russia’s nuclear weapons policy, has repeatedly suggested the possibility of using nuclear weapons during Moscow’s ongoing offensive in Ukraine. Reuters reports Putin’s as saying:
Given the growing geopolitical tensions and the emergence of new external threats and risks, it is important to have modern and constantly ready-to-use strategic forces.
The exercise involved Russia’s full nuclear “triad” of ground-, sea- and air-launched missiles.
Defence Minister Andrei Belousov described the purpose of the drill as a practice for delivering “a massive nuclear strike by strategic offensive forces in response to a nuclear strike by the enemy.”
The ministry also claimed that an “intercontinental ballistic missile was launched” at a test site in the far-eastern Kamchatka peninsula, and that other missiles were launched from a submarine in the Barents Sea in the Arctic and from the Sea of Okhotsk in the Russian far east.
The ministry said the drills were conducted successfully and that the missiles had “reached their targets,” while the TASS news industry published footage of a missile being launched in the Plesetsk cosmodrome in the Russian far north.
In September, Putin suggested that Moscow change its nuclear doctrine to allow it to unleash a nuclear response in the event of a “massive” air attack. Under the proposed rules, Russia would also consider any attack by a non-nuclear country supported by a nuclear power as a joint attack by both, in a seeming reference to Ukraine, which seeks authorisation to use long-range missiles from its allies against Russia.
To date, Kyiv’s calls for escalation have mostly unsettled its allies, led by a reluctant United States. Moscow has said it will respond if the West allows Ukraine to fire longer-range missiles deep into Russia, hence the test-firing and other military drills. As a separate sign of the growing complexity of the conflict, NATO has now confirmed that North Korea has deployed several thousand apparently hapless troops to western Russia.
This latest drill also follows an October 18th exercise in the Tver region, northwest of Moscow, involving field movements by a unit equipped with Yars intercontinental ballistic missiles—theoretically capable of striking U.S. cities.
