WASHINGTON: US President Joe Biden is warning his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin against using chemical or tactical nuclear weapons in the wake of serious losses in his war in Ukraine.
“Don’t. Don’t. Don’t,” Biden said, in an excerpt from an interview with CBS’ “60 Minutes” aired on Friday evening. Biden was responding to an interviewer’s question about the possibility of Putin, whose army is incurring heavy losses in the Ukraine counteroffensive this month, resorting to chemical or tactical nuclear weapons.
“You would change the face of war unlike anything since World War II,” Biden said.
“They will become more of a pariah in the world, more than they have ever been,” the US leader added.
Ukraine has recaptured swaths of territory in the east from occupying Russian forces in recent weeks, boosted by heavy weapons supplied by Western allies.
And Moscow is facing fresh outrage from the West after the discovery of a mass grave outside the formerly Russian-occupied city of Izyum, where, Kyiv officials say, almost all of the exhumed bodies showed signs of torture.
But Putin remained steadfast, saying his war against Russia’s Western-leaning neighbor was proceeding according to plan.
“The plan is not subject to adjustment,” Putin said on Friday. “Our offensive operations in Donbas itself do not stop. They are going at a slow pace… The Russian army is occupying newer and newer territories.”
Meanwhile, Russia’s defence ministry said on Saturday that its forces had launched strikes on Ukrainian positions in several parts of Ukraine, and accused Kyiv of carrying out shelling near the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant.
Russian forces conducted their strikes in the Kherson, Mykolaiv, Kharkiv and Donetsk regions, according to the ministry, which added that Ukrainian forces had carried out an unsuccessful offensive near Pravdyne in Kherson.
Radiation levels at Zaporizhzhia, Europe’s biggest nuclear power plant, remain normal, according to the ministry. It said two incidents of Ukrainian shelling were recorded near the plant on Saturday.
A spokesperson for Ukraine’s foreign ministry denied that Ukrainian forces had carried out shelling near the facility in the south of the country.
Russia and Ukraine have repeatedly accused each other of shelling the Zaporizhzhia plant. The UN International Atomic Energy Agency passed a resolution on Thursday demanding that Russia end its occupation of the facility.
Alexey Kulemzin, the mayor of the eastern Ukrainian city of Donetsk, which is controlled by pro-Russian separatists, said on Telegram that four people had been killed by shelling in a central part of the city. Fragments of French-made Caesar howitzer shells were found, Kulemzin added.
The TASS news agency meanwhile cited local authorities in Russia’s Belgorod region as saying that one person had been killed by Ukrainian shelling.
Reuters was not immediately able to verify battlefield reports. In recent weeks, Ukrainian forces have retaken territory previously held by Russian forces in the northeastern Kharkiv region. East and south of there, Russia has concentrated forces for months in Luhansk and Donetsk provinces, to expand territory held by Moscow-backed separatists since 2014. – AFP/Reuters
