• Britain’s foreign minister says use of nuclear weapons by any country would have consequences.
• James Cleverly says Russia’s military buildup and threats to use nuclear weapons have made the seven-month war in Ukraine worse.
• Britain will continue to support Ukrainians in the defence of their homeland, he said.

Russian President Vladimir Putin needs to stop making strategic mistakes and that any use of nuclear weapons would have consequences, James Cleverly, Britain’s foreign minister, said on Tuesday that

Putin’s military buildup and threats to use nuclear weapons have made the seven-month war in Ukraine worse.

When asked at a side event at the Conservative Party conference how Britain would react if Russia used tactical nuclear weapons, Cleverly said he couldn’t give specifics but there would be a response.

“It would inevitably be the case that the use of nuclear weapons by any country anywhere in the world would not go without a response,” he said.

“I’m not going to discuss the nature or the threshold.”

Earlier, Dmitry Peskov, a spokesman for the Kremlin, said that Moscow did not want to join the “nuclear rhetoric” of the West. He said this after Britain’s Times newspaper said that NATO had warned its members that Putin might test an atomic weapon on the border with Ukraine.

Cleverly said that Putin’s strategic mistakes had hurt Russia and made him more and more isolated around the world.

“We need to make it very clear that his sequence of strategic errors has got to stop,” he said. “We will continue to support Ukrainians in the defence of their homeland, and stand up for the international rules and norms”.

[embedpost slug=”kremlin-praises-elon-musks-ukraine-peace-idea-which-kiev-rejects/”]