Russian President Vladimir Putin reportedly came extremely close to launching a nuclear weapon in Ukraine in October 2022. As per a report by The Sun, an updated biography of former British Prime Minister Liz Truss details the escalation and that her final days in office were spent examining weather maps and preparing for UK radiation cases.
This was after American spies sent “exquisite” intelligence that Putin was seriously close to giving the go-ahead to a nuke attack. The United States raised concerns that there was a 50 per cent chance Russia could deploy a tactical nuke on the Ukrainian battlefields. Another scenario cited was that it might test a larger bomb over the Black Sea.
The biography, titled Out of the Blue, mentions that Truss was concerned about Britain being affected by the attack due to “wrong weather patterns” and spent “numerous hours studying satellite weather data and wind directions”.
According to the book, Whitehall disaster planners were afraid that if an attack happened, radioactive material in the atmosphere could travel across Europe from any blast zone.
Notably, Putin has turned up the heat in Ukraine in the last few weeks. He has deployed 50,000 Russian and North Korean troops to try and take Kursk before Donald Trump is sworn in as the new president of the United States. Notably, Trump is expected to intervene and support talks to end the two-and-a-half-year-long war.
The war is expected to escalate in the coming weeks since, as per a leading military commander in Ukraine, “tens of thousands of enemy soldiers” have reached Kursk to throw out Kyiv’s forces.
Russia-Ukraine war
As per a British defence intelligence assessment seen by The Telegraph, Moscow is likely to increase its kamikaze drone attacks on Ukrainian positions very soon.
Watch: Russia-Ukraine War: Russia Denies Trump-Putin Phone Call
NATO allies believe that Putin will try and grab the region before Trump returns to office on Jan 20 next year.
A report by the Washington Post earlier suggested that Putin and Trump had talked over the phone after the Republican won the presidential election last week. The two were said to have talked about the Ukraine war, with Trump telling him to end the conflict.
However, the Kremlin has rejected the reports, saying no such call took place between the two. “This is completely false information,” Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said.
The Washington Post quoted “anonymous sources familiar with the matter” as saying that Trump “reminded Putin” of America’s sizable military presence in Europe.
Meanwhile, Trump did have a call with Ukrainian President Zelensky who confirmed it in a post on X. He wrote, “I had an excellent call with President Trump and congratulated him on his historic landslide victory – his tremendous campaign made this result possible.”
