Russian Official Warns They’d Go Nuclear If Needed

(TheConservativeTimes.org) – Dmitry Medvedev, the former Russian president and now-deputy chairman of Russia’s Security Council, recently said that Russia would have to resort to using a nuclear weapon if Ukraine’s summer offensive is successful.

Medvedev made the bold statement on Sunday, July 30, in a message on his official social media accounts. Medvedev insisted that should Ukraine successfully repel the Russian invasion and tear off “a part of our land,” it would have “no other option” than to resort to nuclear weapons. Medvedev is well-known as one of the most hawkish officials in the Russian government.

The objective of Ukraine’s current counteroffensive is to retake Ukrainian territory currently held by Russia. Putin unilaterally annexed the current regions under Russian control, though no major country had recognized such an annexation. This, of course, is not the first time Russia has unilaterally annexed Ukrainian territory without international recognition. In 2014, Russian President Vladimir Putin commenced his invasion of the Crimean peninsula, a region of Ukraine, which resulted in its widely unrecognized annexation by Russia.

On Saturday, July 29, Putin said that there had been no significant changes to the war as far as current territorial holdings are concerned. He also said that Ukraine had lost a substantial amount of military equipment since June 4. The Ukrainian government has stated that it is making progress in driving back the Russian advance, albeit at a slower pace than initially hoped.

The news comes as Bild, a German newspaper, recently published a confidential military report showing that Germany is incredibly dissatisfied with how Ukraine’s summer counteroffensive is going. The information detailed how Ukrainian military officers disregard the training and strategy they learned while being trained by Western countries. Ukrainian troops have reportedly divided themselves into smaller units and are attacking Russian soldiers individually instead of as one cohesive unit, leading to an issue of a lack of leadership among the troops.

This has led Putin to publicly gloat about Ukraine’s lack of progress in pushing back Russian forces, proclaiming that “there is no counteroffensive.”