US President Joe Biden has expressed scepticism about Russian President Vladimir Putin’s comment that he had no intention of using a nuclear weapon in Ukraine.
Putin, in a speech on Thursday, played down a nuclear standoff with the West, insisting Russia had not threatened to use nuclear weapons and had only responded to nuclear “blackmail” from Western leaders.
“If he has no intention, why does he keep talking about it?” Mr Biden said in an interview with NewsNation.
“Why is he talking about the ability to use a tactical nuclear weapon?
“He’s been very dangerous in how he’s approached this.”
Putin and other Russian officials have repeatedly said in recent weeks that Russia could use nuclear weapons to protect its territory, remarks interpreted in the West as implicit threats to use them to defend parts of Ukraine that Russia claims to have annexed.
White House national security spokesperson John Kirby said it was possible Russia was considering the use of a so-called ‘dirty bomb’ and was setting up a reason to blame Ukraine. But he said the US could not confirm this.
“They often blame others for that which they are doing themselves or about to do. So that’s why we have to take that seriously,” Mr Kirby told CNN.
“I’ll also tell you that we’re not seeing any signs, even today, that the Russians are planning to use a dirty bomb or to even make preparations for that.”
The US is preparing a new $275 million [£238 million] package of military assistance for Ukraine.
Meanwhile Putin is insisting he has no regrets and the invasion of Ukraine is going to plan.
Putin said at a conference in Moscow on Thursday that the West’s dominance over world affairs was coming to an end.
He accused the West of inciting the war in Ukraine and of playing a “dangerous, bloody and dirty” game.
“We are standing at a historical frontier: Ahead is probably the most dangerous, unpredictable and, at the same time, important decade since the end of World War Two,” the 70-year-old former KGB spy said at an annual foreign policy conference.
Asked whether there had been any disappointments in the past year, Putin answered simply: “No”, though he also said he always thinks about the Russian lives lost in Ukraine.
Putin did not address Russia’s battlefield setbacks in recent months and said Russian aims had not changed.
Russia was fighting to protect the people of the Donbas, he said, referring to an eastern industrial region that comprises two of the four Ukrainian provinces he proclaimed were annexed last month.
Fighting has been going on in the Donbas since 2014 between the Ukrainian military and Russian-backed separatists. Russia annexed the southern Crimean peninsula from Ukraine in 2014.
The Kherson provincial capital city of the same name controls both the only land route to Crimea and the mouth of the Dnipro, the river that bisects Ukraine.
