1 year ago
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By David Ljunggren
(Reuters) - Russia's atomic arsenal and the rules Moscow has laid retired for its usage are the lone factors preventing the West from starting a warfare against Russia, a apical state of President Vladimir Putin said successful an nonfiction published connected Sunday.
Former President Dmitry Medvedev, present lawman president of Russia's Security Council, besides said Moscow would prosecute its warfare successful Ukraine until the "disgusting, astir fascist regime" successful Kyiv was removed and the state had been wholly demilitarised.
In an interrogation aired separately connected Sunday, Putin said Russia is acceptable to negociate with each parties progressive successful the war, but said that Kyiv and its Western backers person refused to prosecute successful talks.
Medvedev, who erstwhile formed himself arsenic a wide moderniser arsenic president from 2008 to 2012, is 1 of the astir hawkish proponents of the war. He regularly denounces the West, which helium accuses of wanting to interruption Russia isolated to payment Ukraine.
"Is the West acceptable to unleash a fully-fledged warfare against us, including a atomic war, astatine the hands of Kyiv?" helium wrote successful a 4,500-word nonfiction for the Rossiiskaya Gazeta newspaper.
"The lone happening that stops our enemies contiguous is the knowing that Russia volition beryllium guided by the fundamentals of authorities argumentation ... connected atomic deterrence. And successful the lawsuit that a existent menace arises, it volition enactment connected them."
Putin and different elder officials person repeatedly said Russia's argumentation connected atomic weapons dictates they tin beryllium utilized if determination is simply a menace to territorial integrity.
Russia has the world's largest stockpile of atomic weapons, with adjacent to 6,000 warheads, according to experts.
Earlier this month, Putin said the hazard of a atomic warfare was rising, but insisted Russia had not "gone mad" and that it saw its ain atomic arsenal arsenic a purely antiaircraft deterrent.
"The Western satellite is balancing betwixt a burning tendency to humiliate, offend, dismember and destruct Russia arsenic overmuch arsenic possible, connected the 1 hand, and the tendency to debar a atomic apocalypse, connected the other," said Medvedev.
If Russia did not get the information guarantees it is demanding, helium said, "The satellite volition proceed to teeter connected the brink of World War Three and atomic catastrophe. We volition bash everything we tin to forestall it".
Medvedev besides said Russia could hide astir mean ties with the West for years and possibly decades to travel and would absorption alternatively connected relations with the remainder of the world.
(Reporting by David Ljunggren; Editing by Leslie Adler)
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