Russia will launch a pre-emptive nuclear strike if West provides Ukraine with nukes, Moscow warns

Russia will launch a pre-emptive nuclear strike if the West provides Ukraine with nukes, one of Vladimir Putin’s closest aides has said in a sinister warning.

Russia’s former president Dmitry Medvedev said the West is failing to grasp Putin’s willingness to bring about a nuclear Armageddon.

A ranting Medvedev also warned that the Ukraine war could last for ‘decades’, with long periods of fighting interspersed by truces.

Medvedev – now deputy head of Putin’s security council – warned that the war has escalated further with Ukraine receiving warplanes, such as US F-16s, and ‘maybe even nuclear weapons’.

‘There are some irreversible rules of war,’ he said on a trip to Vietnam. ‘If it comes to [deliveries of] nuclear weapons [to Ukraine], a preemptive strike will have to be carried out.’

Russia’s former president Dmitry Medvedev (pictured in Vietnam on May 23) said the West is failing to grasp Putin’s willingness to bring about a nuclear Armageddon

The West still fails to grasp this and wrongly believes that Putin will not pull the nuclear trigger, said Medvedev.

‘It will mean that a missile with a nuclear warhead will come flying to them,’ he threatened.

Medvedev is the only other man alive – apart from Putin – who has had his finger on the Russian nuclear button.

Putin is often seen with a functionary nearby evidently clasping his nuclear briefcase.

Meanwhile, Medvedev said the Kremlin feared ‘a guy with dementia’ being elected the the White House, apparently referring to a second term for Joe Biden

He said: ‘The only thing that matters is that a guy with dementia is not elected. But this is possible.’

For Russia, ‘historically it was always easier for us to work with the Republicans,’ he said.

However he said Republican favourite Donald Trump was ‘a nice guy, but a bit of a coward.’

A ranting Medvedev also warned that the Ukraine war could last for ‘decades’, with long periods of fighting interspersed by truces. Pictured: Ukrainian soldiers on a tank ride along the road towards their positions near Bakhmut on Tuesday 

Meanwhile, Medvedev said the conflict in Ukraine could last for decades with long periods of fighting.

‘This conflict will last a very long time, most likely decades,’ he said. ‘As long as there is such a power in place [in Kyiv], there will be, say, three years of truce, two years of conflict, and everything will be repeated.’

This is why ‘it is necessary to destroy the very nature of the Nazi power in Kyiv’, he claimed.

Medvedev often makes hard line comments and last month described Ukrainian authorities as an infection. 

The former president – despite Russian setbacks in the war and his prediction it could drag on for years – insisted that Ukraine would collapse.

‘It will depend on which way the process of disintegration of this dying state will take as a consequence of a lost military conflict,’ he said.

‘Either it will be a way of relatively slow erosion of Ukrainian statehood with gradual loss of remaining elements of state sovereignty.

‘Or instant collapse with simultaneous annihilation of all hallmarks of statehood.’

Medvedev was Russian president from 2008 to 2012 and was the country’s longest-serving prime minister since the collapse of communism.