Putin commands nuclear drills as summit with Trump hangs in balance

Moscow, Oct 22 (PTI) Russian President Vladimir on Wednesday supervised the drills of the country’s strategic nuclear forces as uncertainty hangs over his proposed summit meeting with US President Donald Trump to resolve the Ukraine conflict.

“Today, we have a scheduled strategic nuclear forces management drill, as the defence minister just reported. Let’s get to work,” Putin said in his televised remarks from the crisis command room in the Kremlin.

Addressing online the top military leadership, Putin underscored that the current drills are scheduled involving land, sea and air-based strategic nuclear forces.

According to a Kremlin release, practical launches of intercontinental ballistic missiles and air-based cruise missiles were carried out during the drill.

The exercise was held under the supervision of President Putin and involved Yars ICBM (intercontinental ballistic missile) launchers, the strategic nuclear-powered submarine Bryansk of the Northern Fleet and Tu-95MS strategic bombers, the Kremlin specified.

Meanwhile, amid news of the postponement of the Putin-Trump summit in Hungary’s Budapest to discuss the Ukraine conflict, the Russian officials are issuing different statements.

The Kremlin said that rumours are misleading.

“Again, there is no news yet. It is clear that this whole situation is surrounded by a lot of gossip, rumours, and so on. For the most part, this is fundamentally untrue. There is no news yet,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said, responding to a question from state-run TASS news agency about whether preparations for the meeting between Putin and Trump had been paused.

On Tuesday, during a conversation with reporters at the White House, Trump said that a decision on whether the Russian-US summit in Budapest will take place may come in a couple of days.

Earlier, the CNN reported that a meeting between Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who are engaged in preparations for the Putin-Trump meeting, had been indefinitely postponed.

The publication noted that it is unclear what impact the postponement of their meeting will ultimately have on the talks in Budapest.

Interacting with Russian media, Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said preparations are underway.

“We are affirming that preparations for the summit are progressing,” Ryabkov told the media.

He acknowledged that these preparations “could take various forms”, not necessarily the meeting of Lavrov and Rubio.

“We believe it’s essential to focus on substantive issues, and that is precisely what we are doing, following the instructions we’ve received,” Ryabkov said.

Interfax reported that in Ryabkov’s view, “questions concerning schedules, formats, and the sequence of steps are largely secondary to the substantive matters, therefore, they are pressing ahead with preparations for the summit".

According to sources, Moscow will not agree to any solution of the Ukraine conflict which will lead to only a ceasefire without resolving the root cause of the whole issue, which it says started with the "US-sponsored coup in Kiev with the connivance of the EU in March 2014".

President Trump in his latest proposals has suggested freezing the conflict along the battlelines and let “history decide”. However, nobody is talking about Russia’s security interests asked by Moscow in its letter to NATO in December 2021 and rejected by the eastward expanding western military alliance led by the United States. PTI VS GSP GSP