Russia launches nuclear submarine drills after Putin puts them on high alert

Russia has begun drills of its nuclear submarine fleet days after Vladimir Putin placed Moscow's forces on "high alert".

A.ccording to the Associated Press news agency, Russia’s Northern Fleet said several of their submarines would be joined by warships to “train manoeuvering in stormy conditions”.

Units of the Strategic Missile Forces also dispersed Yars intercontinental ballistic missile launchers to practice secret deployment in eastern Siberia, the Russian Defence Ministry said in a statement.

It comes as Russia's foreign minister warned that any world war sparked by the current crisis "will become nuclear".

The Russian military did not elaborate on why the drills were being carried out, but they come less than a week after Putin placed Moscow’s nuclear forces on a “special regime of combat duty” in response to “aggressive statements” from members of the Nato defence alliance. It is not clear if this is a change from the unit's standard training programme.

Read more: Ruthless Putin 'knows no limit' and will indiscriminately carpet bomb Ukrainian cities, UK warns

Boris Johnson dismissed Putin’s order of his nuclear forces on Sunday, calling it a “distraction” from the struggle his troops are facing in Ukraine.

The United States and Nato condemned the order as dangerous and unacceptable, but are not believed to have altered their own nuclear threat levels.

But Russia continues to raise the spectre of a nuclear war though and, on Wednesday, Moscow's foreign minister Sergei Lavrov further raised tensions after saying any new world war would "become nuclear".

He also defended the Russia invasion of Ukraine, saying Russia would be in "real danger" if Kyiv acquired nuclear weapons.

Of the nine countries who possess nuclear weapons, Russia is believed to have the most.

The Federation of American Scientists (FAS), which compiles the list of the world’s nuclear weapons, says Russia has a total inventory of 5,977 nuclear warheads. This includes stockpiled and retired warheads.

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Of that figure, 1,588 are deployed strategic warheads on ballistic missiles and at bomber bases.

Another 2,889 of Russia’s warheads are non-deployed or reserve weapons. Added together, this gives a military stockpile total of 4,477 nuclear warheads.

Russia has conducted more than 25 test launches of its intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), which can be loaded with nuclear warheads, in the past five years, and plans a further 10 test launches this year, a “significant increase in test frequency”, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists reports.

Putin's forces have been met with fierce resistance in Ukraine, whose strong line of defence has pushed the invasion into its seventh day.

The Russians have so-far targeted built-up areas in Kyiv, Kharkiv, Mariupol and Chernihiv, but have been largely held by Ukrainian armed forces as well as citizens, many of whom have taken up arms.

In Kyiv, Tuesday evening's missile strike on a TV Tower killed five people while a 40 mile-long convoy of soldiers is on its way towards the capital, though US officials have claimed it has made little progress in the past 24 hours, frozen in place by logistical and supply problems.

However, UK defence secretary Ben Wallace warned Russia will now intensify its campaign, with indiscriminate carpet bombing tactics and a scale of brutality that "is going to get worse".

He said Russian advances were being hampered by resistance they had seen but there had also been a switch in Moscow’s tactics as a result.

“What you are seeing now is those heavy bombardments at night, they won’t come into the cities as much, they will – I’m afraid, as we have seen tragically by the looks of things – carpet-bomb cities, indiscriminately in some cases," he said.

“They will fly their air at night rather daytime because what we have seen is they get shot down in the daytime and they will slowly but surely try and surround the cities and then either bypass them or bombard them.

“That is the brutality I’m afraid we are witnessing and it’s going to get worse.”

Watch: Scenes in Kharkiv 'absolutely sickening', says Johnson