Russia: We’ll go nuclear if Ukraine reclaims land

Former president Dmitry Medvedev suggested Russian forces were stifling a counterattack that could provoke a nuclear response.

A convoy of nuclear missiles in Moscow’s Red Square. Picture: Supplied

Dmitry Medvedev, deputy head of the Russian security council, has warned that his country would use nuclear weapons if Ukrainian forces retook occupied territory.

“There would simply be no other choice,” Medvedev, a former president known for his belligerence on Ukraine, said. “So our enemies must pray for our warriors [who are] preventing the ignition of a worldwide nuclear conflagration.”

He suggested that Russian forces were stifling a Ukrainian counterattack that would provoke a nuclear response if it were successful.

Russia's former president, now deputy chairman of the country's Security Council, Dmitry Medvedev visits the Totsky military training field outside the Siberian city of Orenburg. Picture: AFP

Ukraine has recently attacked targets in Russia, including mounting drone strikes on Moscow, which President Zelensky described as an inevitable consequence of the invasion.

Medvedev said the use of nuclear weapons would be justified under a nuclear deterrence policy that was adopted by President Putin in 2020, which allowed him to use atomic weapons in response to a conventional strike that “threatens the very existence of the state”.

Previously there were tighter restrictions on the use of nuclear weapons.

Analysts believe that Russia would be most likely to use a short-range tactical or “battlefield” nuclear weapon fired from Russia, Belarus or the occupied part of Ukraine, or from an aircraft or submarine. These have lower yields than strategic nuclear weapons, which can level entire cities.

Russia annexed Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula in 2014 and four other regions in the east and south of the country last September, when Putin said he was prepared to use “all means” to defend the “territorial integrity” of the Russian-occupied lands and their people.

In October the Kremlin declared that the annexed territories were under its nuclear umbrella.

Medvedev, who was president from 2008-12 (when Putin was prime minister), and prime minister from 2012-20, said in September that strategic nuclear weapons could be used to defend those territories. In January he reiterated the warning that defeat for Russia against Ukraine could lead to nuclear war.

A Russian missile attack on the southern Ukrainian city of Kryvyi Rih yesterday, which struck a residential area and a university, killed six people, including a ten-year-old girl and her mother, officials said. Seventy-five people were injured, some of them buried under rubble.

A video posted by Zelensky, who grew up in the city, showed smoke billowing from a hole in the side of a nine-storey residential building. “This terror will not frighten us or break us,” he wrote on Telegram.

Russia’s defence ministry said on Sunday that three Ukrainian drones had been shot down in attacks that damaged two office towers in Moscow and briefly shut an airport.

One drone was shot down on the city outskirts and two others were “suppressed by electronic warfare” and crashed into an office complex, the Russian defence ministry said.

Kyiv’s military has been circumspect about claiming direct responsibility for such attacks but Zelensky said on Sunday that “war was coming to Russia”.

The Times