At a meeting with his top officials, the president ordered the defence minister and the chief of the military’s general staff to put the nuclear deterrent forces in a “special regime of combat duty”.
The order raises the threat that the tensions could lead to the use of nuclear weapons.
“It’s certainly an escalation,” Al Jazeera’s Moscow correspondent Dorsa Jabbari said. “The last nuclear exercises took place on February 19, when Putin staged very large drills across Russia to test the country’s nuclear programme and [its] readiness.”
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