Kremlin Shuts Down Suggestion to 'Nuke Siberia'

The Kremlin rejected a suggestion from Margarita Simonyan, the editor-in-chief of Russian state broadcaster RT, that Moscow could test an atomic bomb over Siberia as a warning to the West.

"Currently we have still not left the [international] regime of refusing nuclear tests," Dmitry Peskov, Russian President Vladimir Putin's press secretary, said in a statement published by state media outlet RIA Novosti. "This has not happened until now, so I don't think that such discussions are possible now from an official point of view."

As part of an eight-minute segment marking the first anniversary of Russia's annexation of four Ukrainian provinces, Simonyan said it wouldn't be necessary for Moscow to directly strike the West, a common call on Russian state TV. Instead, she suggested Russia should "conduct a thermonuclear explosion hundreds of kilometers above our own territory somewhere in Siberia" to demonstrate its strength.

Simonyan went on to suggest such an explosion would "destroy all radio electronics" and affect satellites, cameras and phones, claiming life would revert back to how it was in 1993 and that she'd be glad to live in a world with fewer gadgets.

The call to test a nuke over Siberia triggered an angry response from some local politicians including Maria Prusakova, a member of the Kremlin-aligned Communist Party in the State Duma representing the eastern Altai Territory.

She commented: "You should at least apologize to all the residents of Siberia, and even more so to those who to this day suffer from the consequences of tests at the Semipalatinsk test site."

Anatoly Lokot, mayor of Novosibirsk in southern Siberia, said: "As a physicist by training, I will comment. There is nothing good about ground-based thermonuclear explosions. The consequences may affect not even hundreds of years but millennia. Because unstable elements are formed, the half-life of which is hundreds of years, and some even a thousand years.

"The problem of ground-based thermonuclear tests and any explosions associated with the release of thermonuclear energy, nuclear energy, must be treated very responsibly."

Ukrainian troops have been making gradual progress but have yet to achieve a breakthrough since launching a counteroffensive against Russian forces in June. Kyiv is hoping to cut Russia's land bridge to Crimea connecting the peninsula, which Putin seized and annexed in 2014, with mainland Russia.

Recently released satellite images show a number of Russian ships from the Black Sea Fleet have left the Crimean port of Sevastopol, which has been struck repeatedly by Ukrainian missiles and drones over the past few weeks.

The photos appear to show the Russian frigates Admiral Essen and Admiral Makarov, three diesel submarines, five large landing ships, several small missile ships, one large landing craft, several minesweepers and other small ships have all left the port.

However speaking at the Warsaw Security Forum, Admiral Rob Bauer, who heads NATO's military committee, warned warned ammunition stockpiles across the alliance are running low and urged members to "ramp up production in a much higher tempo."

He warned: "We started to give away from half-full or lower warehouses in Europe. Therefore the bottom of the barrel is now visible."

Update 10/04/23, 12:17 p.m. ET: This article was updated with additional information.