“And the soul?“. This is the strange and disconcerting question that President Vladimir Putin asked the director of Kurchatov Institutethe country’s main nuclear energy research and development center when cameras focused on him during a meeting in his Kremlin office.
The Russian president, a professed believer who enjoys the unconditional support of the Orthodox Church in the war in Ukraine, smiles expressively while listening to the answer of his interlocutor.
“AND the third priority (from the Kurchatov Institute) They are the soul and the intellect“, the director of the institute, Mikhail Kovalchuk, quickly responded, referring to theThe main areas of work of the centerled by nuclear energy and materials science related studies.
Putin, who recently received an icon from Orthodox Patriarch Kirill, is a fervent defender of the image of Russia as a Moorish reservel before Western liberalism.
Nuclear test field
The meeting comes on the day Russia announced it had prepared the facilities for the Nueva Zembla nuclear siteat the Arctic Pole, the scene of the last Soviet atomic test in 1990, in response to measures taken by the United States.
Russia launches missile at Novaya Zemlya base in the Arctic.
Russian Defense Ministry
“This was also done in response to the measures taken by Washington, which in recent years has focused on improving infrastructure in this area,” he said. Sergei RyabkovDeputy Foreign Minister, according to the agency RIA Novosti.
Ryabkov thus confirmed the information published in the Russian press on the “complete preparation” of the nuclear site. “It is ready to resume large-scale testing activities. It’s totally ready (…) The staff is ready. “If the order comes, we can start testing at any time,” Rear Admiral Andrei Sinitsin, head of the range in the Arctic archipelago, told the Rossískaya Gazeta newspaper.
Sinitsin stressed that if the Russian authorities decide to resume testing, this order “will be executed within the specified time frame.”
At the same time, Ryabkov stressed that Russia’s position on nuclear tests has not changed since in November 2023 the Russian President signed the law that revokes the ratification of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT).
“As determined and formulated by the Russian president, we can conduct such tests, but we will not conduct them if the United States (also) refrains from such measures,” he said.
Ryabkov thus responded to the question of whether Moscow would conduct nuclear tests in response to the West’s authorization for kyiv to use its long-range missiles against targets on Russian territory.
Putin recently warned that If the West sheds light on kyiv, “it will mean that NATO countries, the United States and European countries will go to war against Russia”.
Some Russian politicians and analysts have in recent months urged the Kremlin to approve a nuclear test as a warning to the West about supplying weapons to Ukraine.
The Tsar’s Bomb
Coinciding with the XXII Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Nueva Zembla hosted the rehearsal on October 30, 1961 with the most powerful atomic bomb in historyknown as the tsar’s bomb
The air test was carried out using a Tu-95 bomber and the bomb was dropped by parachute, an explosion equivalent to 50 megatons.
USSR made his last nuclear test -eight charges with a power of 70 kilotons- on October 24, 1990 also in Nueva Zembla.
A cloud of smoke and dust rises into the sky after the detonation of the so-called Tsar Bomba.
Reuters
