MOSCOW (Reuters) – A close ally of President Vladimir Putin warned Western governments on Thursday that a nuclear war would ensue if they gave the green light for Ukraine to use Western long-range weapons to hit targets deep inside Russia.
Vyacheslav Volodin, speaker of the lower house of parliament and a member of Putin’s security council, responded to a vote in the European Parliament calling on EU countries to give such approval to Kiev.
“What the European Parliament is calling for is leading to a world war with nuclear weapons,” Volodin wrote on Telegram.
His message was headlined “For those who didn’t get it the first time” – an apparent reference to a warning by Putin last week that the West would fight Russia directly if it allowed Ukraine to fire the long-range missiles into Russian territory.
The Ukraine war has sparked the biggest confrontation between Russia and the West since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, which is considered the closest the two Cold War superpowers came to a deliberate nuclear war.
The outgoing head of NATO, Jens Stoltenberg, told The Times this week that the Kremlin leader had declared “many red lines” in the past 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 asked 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 give a tough response with more powerful weapons. No one should have any illusions about this.” He said it appeared to Moscow that the West had forgotten the enormous sacrifices made by the Soviet Union during World War II.
He said Europeans should understand that it would take Russia’s RS-28 Sarmat intercontinental ballistic missile, known in the West as the Satan II, just 3 minutes and 20 seconds to hit Strasbourg, where the European Parliament meets.
(Reporting by Reuters; Writing by Mark Trevelyan and Guy Faulconbridge; Editing by William Maclean)