MOSCOW/KYIV: Russia said on Friday it would aim its nuclear warheads at Lithuania if the Baltic state hosted any weapons from the nuclear arsenals of its Nato allies on its territory.
Lithuania is moving to lift a constitutional ban on having nuclear weapons stored in the country, part of an effort to boost its security posture amid Russia’s offensive on Ukraine.
The decision is currently working its way through parliament where it needs a two-thirds majority to pass and has the support of the president and major parties and could come into force this winter.
It would be ‘a very serious turn in terms of escalating tensions’, Kremlin spokesmanDmitry Peskov told state TV when asked about the plan. ‘If there are nuclear weapons on the territory that are aimed at us, accordingly, the territory of that country will fall into the crosshairs of our own nuclear weapons,’ he said.
Lithuania’s President Gitanas Nauseda had announced the plans in July, saying his country wanted to be an ‘integral part of this nuclear deterrence’.
Oil facility attack The Ukrainian military struck a Russian oil industry facility in Volgograd and other targets in several regions across the country, President Volodymyr Zelensky said.
‘Ukrainian long-range sanc-tions were also applied against targets in Dagestan, Udmurtia, and the Tula, Nizhny Novgorod, Perm, and Samara regions,’ he added on X, providing no additional details.
Two people were injured in a missile attack that hit two residential buildings and damaged an industrial facility in Volgograd, which is south of Saratov and also located on the Volga River, local authorities said, without giving details of the industrial facility.
The Volgograd oil refinery run by energy company Lukoil is located on the outskirts of the city.
The governor of Russia’s Perm region in the Ural Mountains said two industrial facilities hadbeen attackedby drones.
Russian attacks Russia attacked two Kyiv petrol stations with jet-powered drones early on Friday, killing two people in an escalation of strikes that Zelensky said were becoming ‘increasingly terrorist in nature.
Ukraine also carried out drone attacks on Russia, killing two people in the Tula region overnight and one on Friday in the Kursk region, local officials said.
With fighting on the front line largely stalled more than 4-1/2 years into the war in Ukraine, Moscow and Kyiv have increasingly struck logistics and other economic targets in recent weeks to try to damage the other’s war effort.-Agencies