Putin “has not yet decided to use nuclear weapons,” the Pentagon stated on Friday, adding that Washington continues to take Putin’s nuclear threats “seriously and will continue to monitor the situation.”
The Pentagon’s remarks follow US President Joe Biden’s warning that Putin’s threats to deploy nuclear weapons may result in a nuclear “Armageddon” conflict.
Pat Ryder, a spokesperson for the Pentagon, stated during a news briefing that “our opinion is that President Putin has not yet made a decision to deploy nuclear weapons.”
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and others in our government and the international community have emphasised how risky and careless these words are, he said.
He continued, “At this time, the United States has no knowledge regarding a change in this circumstance.
The US president claimed that he “knew Putin well to some extent” and that Biden was “not joking” when his Russian counterpart threatened to deploy nuclear weapons on Thursday.
At a fundraiser in New York, Biden stated that “Putin is not joking when he talks about the potential use of tactical nuclear weapons or biological or chemical weapons because his military, we could argue, is badly failing.”
He said that he would continue to assist Ukraine. “For the first time since the Cuban missile crisis in the 1960s, we have a direct threat to use a nuclear weapon,” he said.
Amid a string of humiliating failures for his forces in Ukraine, Vladimir Putin threatened to deploy nuclear weapons in a speech last month.
Although some commentators believed the threat to be more precise and increasing than Putin’s last address, US officials at the time emphasised that this was not the first time the Russian president has made such a threat since the beginning of the re-invasion of Ukraine in February.
The Nobel Peace Prize recipients’ bravery in the face of “intimidation and repression” is praised by Biden.
The Nobel Peace Prize winners from Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine were praised by US President Joe Biden on Friday for defending human rights in the face of “intimidation and injustice.”
The common human desire for rights and dignity cannot be eradicated, Biden said in a statement. “This year’s Nobel Peace Prize recipients remind us that even in the darkest days of war and in the face of intimidation and oppression, the human aspiration for rights and dignity cannot be eradicated.
CNN and AFP
The Pentagon responds to Biden’s predictions of a “end-of-the-world” conflict by discussing Putin’s nuclear threats
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