ANOTHER day, another nuclear threat from Russian tyrant Vladimir Putin.
Today is the 934th day of the full-scale war that he has unleashed upon Ukraine since February 24, 2022.
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It is hard to keep track of the number of times Putin or his stooges have threatened Armageddon.
Make no mistake, on one level these threats are utterly terrifying.
Putin has his finger on the world’s biggest nuclear arsenal, with almost 6,000 warheads that could turn the Earth to ashes.
And we know he has come close to using them.
The head of America’s CIA, Bill Burns, confirmed during a speech in London last week that there was “genuine risk”, early on in the war, that Moscow was about to drop a nuke. It was the autumn of 2022.
The Sun revealed at the time that the then UK Defence Secretary Ben Wallace made an emergency dash to the States for crisis talks at the Pentagon.
Putin was looking at options that included exploding a “tactical nuclear weapon” over the Black Sea, as a show of force.
Tactical nukes have a smaller payload than the larger strategic or doomsday weapons. But, nonetheless, they are devastating.
Putin has his finger on the world’s biggest nuclear arsenal, with almost 6,000 warheads that could turn the Earth to ashes.
At the time, Russian forces were taking a hammering in Ukraine. Putin’s original plan for a three-day invasion was in tatters. Instead of his dreamed-of victory parade, Russian forces had retreated from Ukrainian capital Kyiv, leaving a truly sickening trail of murder, rape and war crimes in their wake.
Then Russia’s frontlines collapsed east of Kharkiv when Ukraine fired its first GMLRS guided missiles from US and UK launchers.
Secret reports
And finally, Putin’s forces were forced to abandon Ukraine’s southern city of Kherson, the only regional capital they had captured since the bloodbath invasion.
Putin was on the ropes and worried he could lose Crimea, home to his Black Sea naval base.
He had to try to stop the rot and thought a nuke was the way to do it.
The West’s response was both frantic and rigorous but also largely unseen at the time.
A diplomatic blitz included hard-headed threats to Russia and urgent entreaties to China and India to help rein in the Kremlin.
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Burns was dispatched to Turkey to meet his Russian counterpart Sergey Naryshkin, head of the SVR foreign intelligence service, which is the modern-day KGB.
Speaking in London last week, Burns said he was “very clear” with Naryshkin what the consequences would be if Putin did go nuclear.
Burns did not reveal details of those threats but The Sun understands they included the prospect of “massive and direct” conventional strikes by the US and its allies against Russia.
In other words, World War Three.
The prospect of fighting America was enough to push Putin back from the brink.
As ruthless and cruel as he surely is, the Kremlin tyrant is not mad. He is a dictator obsessed with his legacy.
He sees himself as a modern-day Tsar restoring Russia’s former glory from the embers of the USSR.
If he wants doting Russian children to sing songs about him in 1,000 years’ time it would not be very clever to obliterate humankind now.
The last thing he wants is Russia wiped off the planet.
Perhaps that is why Burns was so adamant the West must not be cowed by the constant stream of doomsday threats.
The CIA director said: “I have never thought — and this is the view of my agency — that we should be unnecessarily intimidated by [nuclear threats].
Putin’s a bully and he is going to continue to sabre-rattle from time to time.”
The head of Britain’s MI6 agreed. Spy chief Sir Richard Moore, who shared a stage with Burns, said: “There’s only one party talking about nuclear escalation and that’s Putin.
“It’s deeply irresponsible. Nobody in the West is going to be intimidated by such thoughts or any other behaviour by the Russian state.”
These are the people who see the most secret of secret reports on Putin’s state of mind, his motives and his red lines.
They say we must not be scared, because Putin is a bully and the best way to deal with a bully is to stand up to threats.
Their view is shared by Lord Robertson, a former Nato Secretary General who met Putin face to face nine times and is currently leading a defence review to reshape Britain’s Armed Forces.
In a paper written this summer, he argued: “We cannot be inhibited in our support for Ukraine, by fear of escalation.”
He claimed that tactical nuclear weapons have “no military utility”.
Their radiation would blow back on Russia and any use of them would immediately cost Moscow its support from China and India.
Lord Robertson added: “The stakes could not be higher.
If Putin succeeds then our enemies will write the new world order. The safety and security of the West is on the line.”
Which brings us to the here and now. Why is Putin once again threatening war with Nato?
It is all to do with long-range missiles and whether or not the West — and by that, read America — will give Ukraine permission to use them to hit Russia.
Britain and France have given Ukraine bunker-busting stealth cruise missiles with a declared range of 150 miles — in reality, likely much farther.
Britain calls them Storm Shadows, France calls them Scalp, but they are the same weapon designed to hit hardened and well-defended targets including radar installations, ammunition dumps and command posts.
America has donated a ground-launched ballistic missile known as ATACMS, with a similar sort of range.
Ukraine wants to use all of these weapons to hit high-value targets in Russia — most notably the dozen or so airfields it uses almost nightly to launch devastating air strikes.
Iranian-made drones
If Ukraine can put Russia’s airfields at risk, or make them unusable, Moscow would have to use bases farther afield.
That would mean planes having to carry more fuel — and mean fewer bombs or missiles per sortie, and less death and destruction in Ukraine.
Britain has signalled it is willing. Senior UK defence officials support Ukraine’s strategy.
But the White House has stood in the way amid fears the conflict could spiral out of control. And it is that fear which Putin is trying to exploit.
He told Russian TV that such a move would “change the very nature of the conflict”. He added: “It would mean that Nato countries are at war with Russia.”
It seems he is trying to deter America with the same threat of direct conflict that Bill Burns delivered two years ago.
The difference is that shameless Putin thinks nothing of blasting Ukraine with Iranian-made Shahed drones, North Korean ballistic missiles and trainloads of artillery shells.
He is relying on China to fuel his war machine with high-tech tools and components, the US State Department says.
And he has recently taken delivery of more than 200 ballistic missiles from Iran, in a moved that has been condemned by America as “dramatic escalation”.
Why, Ukraine asks, can Russia use foreign weapons to devastate its towns and cities while Kyiv is barred from striking back with western Storm Shadows and ATACMS?
Frustration in Kyiv is now boiling over. It is their sons and daughters who are dying.
Why, asks Ukraine’s President Zelensky, can western jets defend Israel by shooting down Iranian missiles, but they won’t do the same for Ukraine?
Zelensky said yesterday: “Anyone who sees a map where Russia launches its strikes from, trains its forces, keeps its reserves, locates its military facilities, and what logistics it uses, clearly understands why Ukraine needs long-range capabilities.”
Some people claim that arming Ukraine is only prolonging the war, increasing the suffering and delaying the inevitable Russian victory.
The opposite is true.
Ukraine is determined to fight because it has no choice. If it does not fight, it will not exist.
But if we force it to fight with caveats and handicaps — such as bans on hitting Russian targets — more soldiers, civilians and children will die on both sides before Russia is ready to make peace.
As Sir Keir Starmer pointed out yesterday, Vladimir Putin started this slaughter. Only he can end it just as quickly.
The question for Starmer, and US President Joe Biden, as they met at the White House yesterday, was how they can convince him to take that course of action.
Do they bow down to the tyrant’s threats? Or, do they listen to their spy chiefs who say those threats are hollow?
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It is naive to hope that any single western weapon — Storm Shadow or ATACMS — could bring the war to a sudden end.
If Putin is to be persuaded, it is not just about weapons. It is a test of the West’s resolve. Biden and Starmer must show some.
And they would do well to listen to President Zelensky, who echoed Lord Robertson yesterday.
Zelensky’s message to his allies was clear: “Putin only understands strength.”