President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday ordered Russia’s first mobilisation since World War Two and warned that Moscow would defend itself with the might of all its vast arsenal if faced with a nuclear threat from the West.
The blunt warning from Russia’s paramount leader, whose country has more nuclear warheads than even the United States, marks the biggest escalation of the war since Moscow’s Feb. 24 invasion of Ukraine and was accompanied by a decision to call up 300,000 extra reservists.
