Russia-Ukraine war live: Warning Putin could fire nuclear weapons as troops advance on Avdiivka

The war in Ukraine has dented Russia‘s confidence in its conventional forces and increased the importance to Moscow of non-strategic nuclear weapons (NSNWs) as a means of deterring and defeating NATO in a potential future conflict, a leading Western think-tank said on Monday.

NSNWs include all nuclear weapons with a range of up to 5,500 km (3,400 miles), starting with tactical arms designed for use on the battlefield – as opposed to longer-range strategic nuclear weapons that Russia or the U.S. could use to strike each other’s homeland.

Monday’s report by the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) raised the question of whether Russia might be emboldened to fire a NSNW in the belief that the West lacks the resolve to deliver a nuclear response.

“The Russian perception of the lack of credible Western will to use nuclear weapons or to accept casualties in conflict further reinforces Russia‘s aggressive NSNW thought and doctrine,” it said.

It said the logic of using a NSNW would be to escalate a conflict in a controlled fashion, “either to prevent the US and NATO from engaging, or to coerce them into war termination on Russian terms”.

Moscow denies wielding nuclear threats but several of President Vladimir Putin’s statements since the onset of the war in Ukraine have been interpreted as such in the West – starting on day one of the Russian invasion when he warned of “consequences that you have never faced in your history” for anyone who tried to hinder or threaten Russia.

NATO said on Tuesday it does not see any imminent military threat from Russia towards any member of the alliance but was keeping up its deterrence with the largest exercise in decades set to kick off later his week.

“We do all of this to ensure that we have the … forces in place to remove any room for miscalculation or misunderstanding in Moscow about our readiness to protect every inch of NATO territory, and as long as we do that, there will be no attack against the NATO territory,” NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg told reporters in Brussels.

The fierce Kremlin critic has been locked away in the IK-3 penal colony in Kharp in the Yamal-Nenets region about 1,900km (1,200 miles) northeast of Moscow.

Navalny, 47, has kept up an unceasing campaign against the Kremlin from behind bars. He says he has been poisoned, handed a long prison term in one of Russia’s toughest prisons and locked up in a cell where he can only pace back and forth for 11 steps.

At least 27 people have been killed and 25 others have been wounded after shelling in the city, Moscow-installed officials said.

Local leader Denis Pushilin said two children were among those injured.

Congressional leaders were presented with a grim picture of the collapse of Ukraine’s military without continued US aid in the form of ammunition, vehicles and other supplies during a meeting at the White House, according to NBC News.

Officials with knowledge of the 17 January White House meeting between President Joe Biden and congressional leaders Chuck Schumer, Mitch McConnell, Mike Johnson and Hakeem Jeffries told the news outlet that top US officials are predicting massive Russian advances and a total collapse of Ukraine’s ability to fight back should US aid to the latter dry up.

Mr Biden has requested $60bn in supplemental assistance for Ukraine. That request has been met with bickering in Congress, where Republicans are seeking to use the issue as leverage against the administration and Democrats in funding talks.

Russia sharply criticised Western military aid to Ukraine at a UN meeting on Monday.

Just before it started, diplomats from more than 40 countries surrounded Ukraine’s UN Ambassador Sergiy Kyslytsya who read a joint statement underscoring Russia’s “hypocrisy” in criticizing lawful arms transfers to help Ukraine defend itself.

Ukraine’s supporters called Monday’s meeting another Russian attempt “to distract from its war of aggression,” and they condemned military support to Moscow — drones from Iran and ballistic missiles from North Korea — in violation of UN sanctions, as well as military equipment from Belarus.

Russia’s ally China warned that further global chaos could impact the slowing global economy at a UN meeting on Monday.

The council heard many calls for stepped up peace efforts, and there was growing concern from China about the increasing threat to global security from the ongoing war in Ukraine at the same time that Israel and Hamas are at war in Gaza following the militant group’s surprise attacks in southern Israel on 7 October.

“We must spare no effort to stem the spillover of the (Ukraine) crisis at a time when the Palestinian-Israeli conflict drags on, and some hotspot issues are at the risk of flaring up,” China’s UN Ambassador Zhang Jun said. “The world cannot afford to see further spreading of geopolitical clashes at the same time the global economy is slowing down.”

Zhang told the council “the sovereignty and territorial integrity of all countries must be respected,” which Ukraine has insisted on and which Russia has violated by annexing four Ukrainian regions. But the Chinese ambassador criticized Ukraine for seeking to join NATO and warned Kyiv, without naming Russia, that this would deepen Moscow’s security concerns.

Zhang urged the resumption of direct Russia-Ukraine negotiations as soon as possible. He did not mention the peace plan China issued in February 2023 that called for a ceasefire, negotiations and an end to sanctions against Russia but he did focus on the war’s disruption to the world economy.

“The negative impacts of the Ukraine crisis and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict have added snow to the icy cold global economy,” Zhang said. “Countries with significant influence should — refrain from politicizing, instrumentalizing or weaponizing the world economy, and should instead work together to maintain global food, energy and financial security as well as the stability and smooth functioning of industrial and supply chains.”

Russia’s foreign minister clashed with the United States and Ukraine’s supporters at a UN meeting Monday where Moscow ruled out any peace plan backed by Kyiv and the West.

Sergey Lavrov, Russia’s top diplomat, claimed that Ukrainian forces have been “a complete failure” on the battlefield and are “incapable” of defeating or weakening Russia.

He told the UN Security Council that Moscow is always ready to negotiate peace, but he claimed peace plans presented by Ukraine and its Western “masters” are “only used as cover to continue war and continue getting money from Western taxpayers.”

“All of these formulas are a road to nowhere, and the sooner Washington, London, Paris and Brussels realize this the better for Ukraine and the West,” he said, warning that their “crusade against Russia has already created new, clear, reputational and existential risks.”

US deputy ambassador Robert Wood dismissed Lavrov’s claims as “just blatant disinformation” and countered that it was Russia’s 24 February 2022 invasion of Ukraine that started the war, and it is President Vladimir Putin ‘s “single-minded pursuit of the obliteration of Ukraine and subjugation of its people that is prolonging it.”

“Russia’s imperialist designs are obvious,” and “for Russia, anything other than capitulation — total capitulation by Ukraine is the only solution, and that’s just not acceptable to the international community,” Wood said. stressing that the war could end tomorrow if Moscow withdrew hundreds of thousands of troops in Ukraine’s internationally recognized territory.

In a remarkably candid speech the other day, defence secretary Grant Shapps, reflecting on the conflicts that have built up around the world since the end of the Cold War, said that “we find ourselves at the dawn of a new era” and that we are “moving from a post-war to a pre-war world”.

It was intended as a warning, if not an apocalyptic prophecy – but it was, if anything, understated, and it already feels out of date. The war in Ukraine is, after all, almost two years old, with little sign of an early conclusion – and Europe feels threatened. It is also more than three months since Hamas launched its war on Israel, and Israel responded with unprecedented (and often disproportionate) force.

Again, there is no early end in sight, and Benjamin Netanyahu’s pledge to continue the conflict and reject the principle of Palestinian statehood has exacerbated tensions once again. That conflict has spread to Yemen, where Houthi forces – effectively a de facto government in much of that country – have waged a sporadic war against international shipping in the Red Sea, in support of Hamas.