Russia claims that Ukraine has received tactical nuclear weapons

Russian television has come up with a new fake about Ukraine. This time, the "experts" in the studio said that tactical nuclear weapons were transferred to Kiev.

According to Newsweek, this baseless assumption was voiced by Alexei Mukhin, head of the pro-Kremlin Center for Political Information, on the state-run Rossiya-1 television channel. According to him, the delivery of F-16 fighters to Ukraine indicates that tactical nuclear weapons have also been transferred.

"Firstly, the F-16 already exists, and I am sure that tactical nuclear weapons already exist. Unfortunately, practice shows that when they announce something, it happened several months ago," Mukhin said.

There is no evidence, however, that the West has sent nuclear weapons to the Ukrainians. Ukraine gave up its nuclear arsenal in exchange for security guarantees from Russia and the United States under the Budapest Memorandum. Despite this, pro-Kremlin media and officials have repeatedly spread the nuclear weapons narrative since Russia began its invasion in February 2022.

Another guest on the show, Konstantin Zatulin, a member of the ruling United Russia party, disagreed with Mukhin.

"I think they are trying to catch us by the tongue, since we have already managed to say that we will perceive the appearance of the F-16 as a nuclear threat... But I am sure that they have definitely not crossed the threshold associated with the provision of tactical nuclear weapons," Zatulin said.

The Kremlin has vowed to shoot down Western F-16 fighters supplied by Ukraine, while claiming it does not believe they will turn the tide of the war.

Tactical nuclear weapons are intended for battlefield use, as opposed to strategic weapons designed to be fired across vast distances to wipe out enemy cities. The underlying physics is the same, using nuclear fission and fusion reactions to release vast amounts of energy. The destructive power of tactical nuclear weapons, while typically smaller than strategic weapons, is still comparable with the atomic bombs used by the United States to destroy the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War Two. The United States has about 200, half of which are at bases in Europe. Russia has about 1,558 non-strategic nuclear warheads, experts at the Federation of American Scientists estimated, opens new tab in March. These could be delivered by different means including being dropped as bombs or fitted to a variety of missiles that are capable of carrying either nuclear or conventional warheads.

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