Senior Russian security official and former president Dmitry Medvedev said on Saturday Russia could destroy Ukraine's capital Kyiv with non-nuclear weapons in response to the use of Western long-range missiles by Ukraine.
Medvedev said Moscow already had formal grounds to use nuclear weapons since Ukraine's incursion into Russia's Kursk region, but could instead use some of its new weapon technologies to reduce Kyiv to "a giant melted spot" when its patience runs out.
"Holy shit! It's impossible, but it happened," he wrote in English on the Telegram messaging app.
Meanwhile, Sir Keir Starmer has said the UK and US have come to a “strong position” in their quest for a resolution to the conflict in Ukraine following his meeting with US president Joe Biden.
The UK prime minister described his discussions with Mr Biden as “long and productive”, but would not be drawn on what the pair had decided regarding Ukraine’s potential use of Western weaponry against Russian targets.
At the beginning of their meeting in the Blue Room at the White House in Washington DC on Friday, Mr Biden said “I don’t think much about Vladimir Putin” when asked about the Russian president’s threat of war with Nato.
