While Russia insists on continuing to accuse Ukraine of preparing a “dirty bomb”, this Wednesday the head of the Kremlin, Vladimir Putin, presided over the maneuvers of the Grom (thunder) nuclear forces by videoconference. They are the first exercises of this type since Moscow troops entered Ukrainian territory on February 24.
In the exercises, the Russian strategic forces have carried out a massive nuclear launch drill in response to an enemy attack with the same weapons, Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu explained. These exercises, which Russia conducts every year, are aimed at testing the readiness of the command centers of the nuclear forces, the Kremlin said.
The tests have lasted a few minutes, long enough for the missiles to have reached the target, set at the Kura military range, in Kamchatka, the Russian peninsula in the Pacific.
Yars ICBMs have been launched from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome in European Russia and Sineva ballistic missiles from the Barents Sea in the Arctic. For their part, Tu-95MC strategic bombers have launched cruise missiles. The nuclear danger has been present all these months of armed conflict with Ukraine.
This week the threat that has been raised is that of a dirty bomb, not as terrible as the atomic apocalypse, but worrying because radioactive material is added to the conventional explosive.
Shoigu spoke by phone over the weekend with his counterparts from the United States, France and the United Kingdom, accusing Ukraine of preparing a “dirty bomb” against its own territory and then blaming Russia. Westerners rejected the accusations and believe that Moscow’s goal is to have an excuse to further escalate the conflict.
Russia has insisted this Monday on the allegations. Shoigú has picked up the phone again, this time to speak with his colleagues from India and China. The Kremlin spokesman, Dimitri Peskov, has stressed that Russia will continue to defend these accusations through diplomatic channels.
On a more internal level, today the news that the journalist and presenter Ksenia Sobchak, daughter of Putin’s mentor, has fled Russia has also been explosive. Local agencies have assured that the communicator, positioned in recent years in the liberal opposition, has left the country after the police have searched her house.
The search was part of the investigation against Kiril Sujanov, commercial director of “Ostorozhna.Media”, Sobchak’s company, and arrested on Tuesday on suspicion of extorting several officials. Sobchak had suggested on his Telegram channel that this arrest is politically motivated.
According to the Tass agency, which has cited law enforcement, Sobchak is not a person of interest. However, the same agency has reported that she was going to be arrested. Ksenia Sobchak, 40, “bought airline tickets to Dubai and Turkey to confuse agents,” a source told Tass. The authorities had planned to arrest her at the Vnukovo airport, but she has evaded her arrest by traveling to Lithuania via Belarus overland.
Sobchak ran in the 2018 presidential election against Putin. But she was a controversial figure among some opposition activists, who accused her of having ties to the Kremlin. And she is that she is the daughter of the former mayor of St. Petersburg Anatoli Sobchak, the man who introduced Putin to politics. For years it was said that Putin was Sobchak’s godfather, something that she denied shortly before those elections.
