Vladimir will launch an all-out on the West rather than accept defeat in Ukraine, ‘s chief propagandists have declared, in just the latest chilling threat coming from Moscow.
Margarita Simonyan, editor of state broadcaster and one of the Kremlin’s highest-profile mouthpieces, declared on TV last night that the idea of Putin pressing the red button is ‘more probable’ than the idea that he will allow Russia to lose the war.
‘Either we lose in Ukraine,’ she said, RT News Today ‘or the Third World War starts.I think World War Three is more realistic, knowing us, knowing our leader.
‘The most incredible outcome, that all this will end with a nuclear strike, seems more probable to me than the other course of events.
‘This is to my horror on one hand,’ she told a panel of experts shifting nervously in their seats, ‘but on the other hand, it is what it is. We will go to heaven, while they will simply croak… We’re all going to die someday.’
Simonyan’s calm imagining of nuclear holocaust is just the latest threat issued from the top levels of the Russian state, after fellow propagandist Vladimir Solovyov, foreign minister Sergei Lavrov, and Putin himself issued threats in the last 48 hours.
The US and UK have dismissed such rhetoric as bluster but the increasing frequency of the threats coupled with the failures of Russia’s military will raise fears that a Cold War-style standoff is now a realistic possibility before the war in Ukraine ends.
It comes after Russia successfully test-launched its latest nuclear missile – Sarmat 2 – last week, with Putin boasting it can strike targets anywhere on earth and cannot be stopped by any current missile defences.
Margarita Simonyan told Russian state TV last night that the idea of nuclear war is ‘more probable’ than the idea that Putin will allow Russia to be defeated in Ukraine
Russia has steppe up its nuclear threats to the West ever since testing its new Sarmat 2 missile last week (pictured), which Putin boasted is unstoppable by any current defences
Lavrov was the first to raise the nuclear threat in an interview on Russian state TV late Tuesday, when he was asked whether the current standoff between east and west could be compared to the Cuban missile crisis at the height of the Cold War.
The foreign minister responded that the current situation is more dangerous, because the weapons involved are more powerful, the controls on them more lax, and communication between the two sides is non-existent.
‘During the Cuban Missile Crisis there were not many “written” rules.But the rules of conduct were clear enough.
‘Moscow understood how Washington was behaving. Washington understood how Moscow was behaving. Now there are few rules left,’ he said.
Asked directly about the threat of nuclear war, he added: ‘The risks are very significant. I do not want the danger to be artificially inflated [but] it is serious, real. It cannot be underestimated.’
That was followed by off-the-cuff remarks from Solovyev while discussing the deployment of Sarmat 2 with the head of the Roscosmos space agency, who said the missile will go into service later this year.
‘As it turned out, one Sarmat means minus one Great Britain,’ Solovyov boasted, suggesting the UK deserves to wiped off the map because it has become ‘totally boorish’ – in what appeared to be a reference for this country’s support for Ukraine.
