MOSCOW (Reuters) – A close ally of President Vladimir Putin warned Western governments on Thursday that nuclear war would ensue if they gave Ukraine the green light to use long-range Western weapons to attack targets deep inside Russia.
Vyacheslav Volodin, speaker of the lower house and a member of Putin’s Security Council, was responding to a vote in the European Parliament calling on EU countries to give Kiev such consent.
“The demands of the European Parliament will lead to a world war with nuclear weapons,” Volodin wrote on Telegram.
His message was titled “For those who didn’t get it the first time” – an apparent reference to a warning from Putin last week that the West would fight Russia directly if it allowed Ukraine to fire long-range missiles at Russian territory.
The Ukraine war has triggered the biggest confrontation between Russia and the West since the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. At that time, the two Cold War superpowers came closest to a targeted nuclear war.
Outgoing NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg told the Times this week that the Kremlin chief had previously drawn “many red lines” but did not escalate the conflict with the West when they were crossed. Putin’s spokesman said his comment was dangerous and provocative.
In a non-binding resolution adopted on Thursday, the European Parliament called on EU countries to “immediately lift restrictions on the use of Western weapons systems supplied to Ukraine against legitimate military targets on Russian territory.”
Volodin wrote: “If something like this happens, Russia will respond with tougher weapons. No one should have any illusions about that.” He said Moscow had the impression that the West had forgotten the enormous sacrifices made by the Soviet Union in World War II.
He said Europeans should be aware that Russia’s RS-28 Sarmat intercontinental ballistic missile, known in the West as Satan II, would take just 3 minutes and 20 seconds to hit Strasbourg, the meeting place of the European Parliament.
(Reporting by Reuters; Writing by Mark Trevelyan and Guy Faulconbridge, editing by William Maclean)
