Russian Security Council Deputy Chairman Dmitry Medvedev on Thursday spoke for the first time about Moscow’s possible defeat in the war in Ukraine, warning NATO that it could trigger a nuclear war, Reuters reports.

“The defeat of a nuclear power in a conventional war could trigger a nuclear war,” he wrote on his Telegram channel on Thursday.

“Nuclear powers have never lost major conflicts on which their fate depends,” added Dmytro Medvedev, who previously served as Russia’s prime minister and president under Moscow’s “cycle of power” that allowed Vladimir Putin to remain in power for more than two decades .

Medvedev also said that the leaders of NATO and the partner countries of the North Atlantic Alliance, who are supposed to meet on Friday at the Ramstein Air Base in Germany, should think about the risks of their policy towards Ukraine and Russia.

The Russian official’s comments on Thursday appear to be the first time he has acknowledged the possibility of defeat in the “special military operation” launched by Putin on February 24, although he has previously threatened the West with Moscow’s nuclear weapons.

Medvedev stated at the end of last year that Russia’s nuclear weapons prevent the West from declaring war on it, assuring that Moscow will continue the war in Ukraine until the “disgusting, almost fascist regime” in Kyiv is removed and the country is fully demilitarized. .

What Vladimir Putin said about Russia’s use of nuclear weapons

Russia and the United States, undoubtedly the world’s largest nuclear powers, together possess about 90% of the world’s nuclear warheads. President Vladimir Putin is the one who makes the final decisions regarding Russia’s use of nuclear weapons.

Although NATO has a conventional military advantage over Russia, Moscow has an advantage over the alliance in Europe in terms of nuclear weapons.

Putin’s invasion last year sparked Europe’s biggest conflict since the end of World War II and heightened tensions between Moscow and the West to levels not seen since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.

The President of the Russian Federation threatened to use nuclear weapons both in his speech on September 21, when he announced the decree on partial mobilization in Russia, and in his speech on September 30, when he announced the annexation of the occupied Ukrainian territories.

In December, he appeared to tone down his rhetoric, warning that the danger of nuclear war was “growing” but saying Russia was not crazy enough to start one. But in his New Year’s message to Russians, he once again called the West Russia’s real enemy in Ukraine and warned that Moscow would not back down in the conflict.

Is Dmitry Medvedev more pessimistic than the President of Russia about the victory in Ukraine?

Earlier this year, Putin ordered the Admiral Gorshkov, one of the most modern ships of the Russian fleet, armed with new hypersonic Zircon cruise missiles, to be sent to the Atlantic Ocean. Russia says this missile, developed by its arms industry, can hit targets up to 1,500 kilometers away.

Putin said this Wednesday that Russia’s arms industry was ramping up production and that Moscow’s victory in Ukraine was “inevitable,” and Medvedev’s comments just a day later seemed somewhat unusual in that light.

Russia’s nuclear doctrine allows for a nuclear strike in the event of “aggression against the Russian Federation using conventional weapons, when there is a threat to the very existence of the state.”

Washington did not provide details on what it would do if Putin ordered the use of nuclear weapons for the first time since the bombing of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II.

According to the Federation of American Scientists, Russia has 5,977 nuclear warheads, while the US has 5,428, China 350, France 290 and the UK 225.

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