The move comes after an acrimonious exchange with senior Western officials, labelled by Moscow as ‘provocative threats’.
Moscow plans to hold a military exercise simulating the use of tactical nuclear weapons, the Defense Ministry announced, just days after the Kremlin reacted angrily to comments by senior Western officials about the war in Ukraine.
The drills are in response to “provocative statements and threats of certain Western officials regarding the Russian Federation,” the Defence Ministry said in a statement Monday.
The exercise is intended to “increase the readiness of non-strategic nuclear forces to fulfil combat tasks” and will be held on President Vladimir Putin’s orders, according to the statement. The manoeuvres plan to involve missile units of the Southern Military District along with Russia’s air force and navy.
They’re a threat because they’ve always been both bellicose and nuclear armed. It’s infuriating. Between warmongering and nuclear or horribly unstable and nuclear, I’m not sure if I’d rather have Russia or Pakistan.
Coming from a country bordering Russia and having had to deal with their bullshit for my entire life, the most frustrating thing about Russian bullshit is that if they could just be normal, they could be an actually wealthy and significant European country in a few decades. But no, they have always had this HUGE inferiority complex, which means that they need to continuously prove that they’re great, powerful and important. And the only way they know how to prove their greatness and importance is to flex their “power” on their neighbors, including by militarily expanding their borders, while most of their “peer” countries (most importantly pretty much all of Europe) have moved on from this sort of view of being “powerful” after WW2 by the latest.
Russia is pretty wealthy though.
Or more accurately, a few Russians are very wealthy