Putin says he’s ready to use nuclear weapons if Russian state at stake, but ‘there has never been such a need’

Moscow is ready to use nuclear weapons if there is a threat to the existence of the Russian state but “there has never been such a need,” President Vladimir Putin said in an interview with state media published Wednesday.

Moscow is ready to use nuclear weapons if there is a threat to the existence of the Russian state but “there has never been such a need,” President Vladimir Putin said in an interview with state media published Wednesday. The Russian leader made the comments to Rossiya 1 and RIA Novosti ahead of presidential elections on March 15, in which he is widely expected to sail through to a fifth term in office, and as his full-scale war in Ukraine grinds into a third year. Putin said that from a military and technical standpoint, Russia is ready for a nuclear war, though he didn’t say one was imminent. He warned that if US troops were deployed to Ukraine, Russia would treat them as interventionists. “Apart from (US President Joe) Biden, there are enough other experts in the sphere of Russian-American relations and strategic restraint. So I don’t think that everything is going to go head-on here, but we are ready for it,” Putin said. Putin said the United States is also developing nuclear forces but that doesn’t mean they are ready to “launch a nuclear war tomorrow.”