“Just one launch, Boris, and England is gone,” said a broadcaster on Russian state television earlier this week, standing in front of a simulation of Britain and Ireland being wiped out by a nuclear weapon.
The alarming clip, which was circulated widely on social media, was swiftly criticised in the west as hyperbolic and provocative.
It was the latest instance of escalating Russian rhetoric over the possibility that Moscow could deploy nuclear weapons in retaliation for the west’s support for Ukraine. In February, Russia’s president Vladimir Putin unnerved the world when he put his nuclear forces on high alert, a move that signalled an apparent readiness to deploy them.
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