Russia just sent a chilling reminder to the world of its nuclear arsenal

The world has been given a chilling reminder of Russia's nuclear weapons arsenal, as ex-president and deputy chairman of the country's security council Dmitry Medvedev says they may use them against an enemy state - even if the enemy state doesn't use them first.

Speaking on Saturday (March 26), Medvedev detailed the four different scenarios in Russia's nuclear doctrine, The Guardianreported.

“We have a special document on nuclear deterrence. This document clearly indicates the grounds on which the Russian Federation is entitled to use nuclear weapons. There are a few of them, let me remind them to you: number one is the situation, when Russia is struck by a nuclear missile. The second case is any use of other nuclear weapons against Russia or its allies.

“The third is an attack on a critical infrastructure that will have paralysed our nuclear deterrent forces. And the fourth case is when an act of aggression is committed against Russia and its allies, which jeopardised the existence of the country itself, even without the use of nuclear weapons, that is, with the use of conventional weapons.”

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Additionally, Medvedev warned how there is a “determination to defend the independence, sovereignty of our country, not to give anyone a reason to doubt even the slightest that we are ready to give a worthy response to any infringement on our country, on its independence”.

In response, Ukraine's president Volodymyr Zelensky appeared at Qatar’s Doha Forum via video link and cautioned countries of the threat Russia poses. With approximately 6,000 nuclear warheads, Russia has the largest stockpile of nuclear weapons in the world.

“Russia is deliberating bragging they can destroy with nuclear weapons, not only a certain country but the entire planet," Zelensky said.

The talk of nuclear weapons from Medvedev comes as Russian could lose the key city of Kherson in southern Ukraine which was one of the first places to fall to Russia when the invasion into the country began on February 24, Ukraine’s defence ministry, Markian Lubkivskyi has claimed.

“I believe that today the city will be fully under the control of Ukrainian armed forces," he said. "We have finished in the last two days the operation in the Kyiv region so other armed forces are now focused on the southern part trying to get free Kherson and some other Ukrainian cities.”

It's not the first time nuclear weapons have been mentioned in the ongoing war. Three days after the Russian invasion into Ukraine began, Putin put nuclear forces on "special alert" and warned that "whoever tries to hinder us" in Ukraine would see "consequences you have never seen in your history".

A spokesperson for the Russian president has refused to rule out if Putin will use nuclear weapons in the war, with Dmitry Peskov telling CNN's Christiane Amanpour when pressed on the matter: “Well, we have a concept of domestic security, and, well, it’s public. You can read all the reasons for nuclear arms to be used.

“So, if it is an existential threat for our country, then it can be used, in accordance with our concept. There are no other reasons that were mentioned in that text.”

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