“Putin’s lost confidence in his ability to wind Trump around his finger” • FRANCE 24 English

“Putin’s lost confidence in his ability to wind Trump around his finger” • FRANCE 24 English

Russia’s President Vladimir Putin has ordered officials to submit proposal proposals for the resumption of nuclear testing. The move from Moscow comes just a week after the US President Donald Trump suggested the United States would restart its own nuclear tests. While the US military has tested nuclear capable weapons, it’s not detonated atomic weapons since 1992. Now, for more on all of this, we can bring in our international affairs editor, Philip. Philip, good to see you. Why are we seeing this possible arms race now in 2025? This is, I think, a tip fort race between Donald Trump on one side and Vladimir Putin on the other. Vladimir Putin’s lost confidence in his ability to wind Donald Trump round his little finger and uh push the possibility of a peace agreement in Ukraine into the long grass. Donald Trump seems to be getting slightly more irritated with Vladimir Putin and uh Vladimir Putin’s way of threatening Donald Trump is basically to say, “Okay, well, if you’re talking about nuclear weapons, so are we.” And we could start uh nuclear tests, the first ones which Russia would undertake since 1991. We’re still quite a long way off from that actually happening, but Vladimir Putin has been uh seen on television handing out awards to those who are responsible for working on nuclear weapons. All of this was made to look very official on the television. There’s all the imagery and all the official of it. Uh not only for uh audiences outside Russia, but also for the domestic audiences of Vladimir Putin is in control and uh ready to step up to the challenge if it has to be. But if you read between the lines, what we see here is we’re talking about three weapons that Russia’s talking about developing. First one is the Bureau cruise missile. The second is a Poseidon super torpedo which they say could cause a tsunami underwater and destroy whole batches of ships. And the third one is the Orishnik nuclear capable missile. Uh but these are not new uh nuclear weapons that Russia has just developed. They’ve been around for quite a few years already since at least 2018. I think what the Russians are doing is trying to issue a veiled threat and a warning to NATO countries to the tone of if you keep supplying weapons to Ukraine, then we are going to start nuclear testing and we’re going to start building up our nuclear capacity. And I think that is the message that the Russians are trying to give over right now and also trying to demonstrate to Donald Trump, yes, well, we’re also uh drafting plans for possible nuclear tests. It’s all in the wording, possible nuclear test, drafting plans. That means nothing’s imminent going to happen anytime soon. But in the meantime, today there’s been a statement from the European Union urging Russia to stop making nuclear threats and actions which they say could lead to an arms race. But the fact that Russia did this in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s statement last week, it’s not like Vladimir Putin woke up today and said, “Oh, this is something I’m thinking of doing.” He’s doing it in response to something from Washington. I’m just curious, did European officials uh tell Donald Trump to to stop making these nuclear threats and not be silly and start testing nuclear weapons? I don’t think Donald Trump’s nuclear threats were specifically designed to uh hit the Russians. I think they were more designed to be aimed at China uh due to that visit that Donald Trump made to Xi Jinping uh last week uh which resulted in some deals. But it’s basically the Chinese who are dictating what Donald Trump has to do as far as uh the tariffs are concerned right now. Um the the message coming out of the United States is also very unclear. Donald Trump’s um not spec being specific about what he actually means. Is he testing weapon systems? That’s something the United States already does. Is he going to actually conduct nuclear explosions? Uh the only country that’s been doing that so far the in in the 21st century is North Korea. Donald Trump says, well, everybody seems to be doing nuclear testing and that we holded it many years ago. But with others doing testing, I think it’s appropriate that we do also. Neither China nor Russia, as I was saying before, have undertaken any nuclear tests uh for at least 30 years. So uh we don’t really know where Donald Trump is coming from with all of this. It seems to be a sort of veiled threat to start doing nuclear testing directed at the Chinese and also at the Russians. But it’s not good news as far as the possibility of a a nuclear arms race is concerned because uh that that is always a possibility if one country gets scared and another one starts to imitate what the country opposite is doing and that is the risk that we are seeing Here.

A week after the US pointed to possibly starting to test nuclear weapons for the first time in decades, Russia announced it could also resume its own programme. The timing of this possible arms race is not a total coincidence: “Putin’s lost confidence in his ability to wind Trump around his finger” says FRANCE 24’s Philip Turle, which could explain Moscow’s decision to threaten the US with possible nuclear testing.
#Russia #nuclearweapons #Trump

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