MOSCOW (Reuters) – President Vladimir Putin said on Thursday that Moscow would regard a nuclear attack on its allies as a nuclear attack on Russia itself and would immediately respond.
Putin said that Russia had tested an array of new nuclear weapons, including a new nuclear-powered missile at the end of 2017 which could reach almost any point in the world and could not be intercepted by anti-missile systems.
“We would consider any use of nuclear weapons against Russia or its allies to be a nuclear attack on our country. The response would be immediate,” Putin said in a speech to Russian lawmakers.
(Reporting by Andrey Ostroukh and Polina Ivanova; Writing by Maria Tsvetkova; Editing by Andrew Osborn)
