Featured Image Credit: Alamy/Russian State TV
Topics: Ukraine, Russia, Vladimir Putin
Joe Harker
Russian State TV has boasted they could nuke and wipe out major European cities in just 200 seconds through a terrifying simulation.
State propaganda is a tool Vladimir Putin has used extensively throughout his time in charge of Russia and it has been employed extensively following his invasion of Ukraine.
Putin claims Russian troops are conducting a 'special military operation' to 'denazify' Ukraine, a view not shared by the large majority of the rest of the international community.
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Many nations have placed tough sanctions on Russia in retaliation for their invasion and have supplied the Ukrainian military with weapons to continue the fight against Putin.
As the conflict continues, there are concerns that Putin could employ nuclear weapons and he has previously bragged about new hypersonic missiles which could wipe out other countries.
And now, Russian state TV's 60 Minutes programme announced the country had the capability to strike London, Paris and Berlin with nuclear weapons that would leave 'no survivors'.
Playing a terrifying simulation of what a nuclear strike on Europe would look like, they estimated missiles launched from Kaliningrad, Russia's enclave on the Baltic Sea, would strike Berlin in 106 seconds, Paris in 200 seconds and London in 202 seconds.
Russian politician Aleksey Zhuravlyov said they would only need to fire 'one Sarmat missile and that’s it, the British Isles are no more'.
One of the show's hosts pointed out that since the UK also had nuclear weapons, the threat of a retaliatory strike meant 'no one will survive in this war'.
Since both the UK and France have nuclear arsenals and are part of the NATO alliance a strike on them risks a retaliatory nuclear strike and would bring the US into the conflict.
Russia has thousands of nuclear weapons in what is the largest stockpile of nukes in the world with the Americans a close second, France and the UK both have fewer than 300 nuclear missiles.
Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, around a third of their nuclear arsenal was deployed in Ukraine.
According to Sky News, the newly independent Ukraine agreed in 1994 to give up their nukes in exchange for promises from Russia not to violate global security.
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