With Russian forces making territorial gains in the military offensive in Ukraine, President Vladimir Putin has ordered the military to exercise with tactical nuclear missiles to ‘increase readiness’.
The Russian defence ministry reported on Monday: “On instructions from the Supreme Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, in order to increase the readiness of non-strategic nuclear forces to carry out combat missions, the General Staff has begun preparations for holding exercises in the near future with missile formations of the Southern Military District with the involvement of aviation, as well as naval forces.”
“During the exercise, a set of activities will be carried out to practice the preparation and use of non-strategic nuclear weapons,” it added.
“The exercise is aimed at maintaining the readiness of personnel and equipment of units for the combat use of non-strategic nuclear weapons to respond and in order to unconditionally ensure the territorial integrity and sovereignty of the Russian state in response to provocative statements and threats of individual Western officials against the Russian Federation,” the ministry added.
President Macron has, in the recent past, been talking about not being averse to having French ‘boots on the ground’ in Ukraine.
Again on Friday, President Macron said that France is “not ruling anything out” when it comes to sending Western troops to Ukraine.
“I'm not ruling anything out, because we are facing someone who is not ruling anything out. We have undoubtedly been too hesitant by defining the limits of our action to someone who no longer has any and who is the aggressor,” he had added.
Russia’s southern military district—also the smallest in geographical size among Russia’s five military districts—is also the one that primarily is mandated with the six occupied Ukrainian ‘oblasts’ (provinces) of Crimea, Donetsk, Kherson, Lugansk, Sevastopol and Zaporizhzhia.
Putin’s order comes in the middle of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s ongoing visit to Europe beginning with France.
In Paris, President Xi is holding talks with French President Emmanuel Macron and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen on Monday. After that, Xi is scheduled to visit Serbia and Hungary.
Significantly, the order comes at a time when there are reports of the presence of about 1,500 troops of France's 3rd Infantry Regiment, which is under the French Foreign Legion. The reports add that these soldiers have been deployed to support the Ukrainian 54th Independent Mechanized Brigade in Slavyansk.
The latest development has underlined the Russian posture of positioning nuclear weapons as a mode of deterrence while also complicating China’s relations with Europe, mainly France.
