At a Democratic Party rally thursday in New York, Joe Biden warned that “we have not faced a possible ‘Armageddon’ since Kennedy and the missile crisis” in Cuba in 1962.
“For the first time since the Cuban missile crisis, we have a direct threat of the use of nuclear weapons,” he insisted.
The U.S. president said his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, is in a situation where it is difficult to find a way out — especially after the latest military setbacks in Ukraine — and that he is likely looking for face-saving solutions.
Biden added that he knows him “quite well” and that he is not joking when he says he could use tactical nuclear or biological weapons, because his military is demonstrating a lower level than expected. “I don’t think you can use tactical nuclear weapons without ending in ‘Armageddon,'” the president warned.
Continued setbacks for Russia in Ukraine
Despite Moscow’s threats, Ukrainian troops maintain a counteroffensive with which they have retaken almost the entire Kharkiv region and important logistics centers such as Izium, Kupiansk and Liman in the east. “Since October 1 alone and in the Kherson region, more than 500 km2 of territory and dozens of localities have been liberated,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in the evening.
Hours earlier, Zelensky had called on European leaders meeting at a summit in Prague to continue military aid in Kiev so that “Russian tanks do not advance on Warsaw or Prague.” The deliveries of U.S. and European weapons outrage Russian authorities, who on Thursday summoned the French ambassador to Moscow precisely because of the military aid offered by Paris to Kiev.
Putin, for his part, has assured that the military situation would “stabilize”, despite the defeats and the failures in the mobilization of hundreds of thousands of reservists, which caused a flight of many men of fighting age. And his spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, assured that the lost territories will be “recovered”. Days earlier, the president signed the annexation of four regions of Ukraine under partial control of his troops. This opens the door to employing nuclear weapons to repel the Ukrainian counteroffensive since, according to Moscow’s doctrine, it can use this arsenal to protect its territory.
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