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VLADIMIR Putin is being pushed to green light a nuclear bomb test as a warning to the West.
Russia is ramping up its threats as Prime Minister Keir Starmer and President Joe Biden look to bolster Ukrainian missile permissions so they might strike deep targets inside Putin’s country.
Now a leading Kremlin MP with links to the Russian army has urged the delusional tyrant to carry out an atomic explosion at a test site.
“We need to carry out a nuclear explosion somewhere, at some testing ground,” demanded Andrei Kolesnik, who leads the ruling United Russia party.
He said: “Nuclear tests are currently prohibited in our country.
“But maybe people should see what all this actually leads to, they should hear.
“If we lift the moratorium, maybe humanity will think twice.”
Such a test could be seen as a renewed warning against Nato over the possibility that the US and UK could allow Ukraine to use their long-range missiles inside Russia.
Putin warned this week that the shift in policy would mean war.
He said: “This would in a significant way change the very nature of the conflict… It would mean that Nato countries are at war with Russia.”
Britain and America have previously held back on loosening permissions because of a fear of Russian retaliation.
There are concerns that Putin’s so far empty threats over nuclear revenge could be realised if Western weapons struck targets on his soil.
Kremlin hardliners could also push for attacks against missile strongholds in Nato countries – such as an airbase in Poland.
This would invoke Nato’s Article 5 mutual defence clause – triggering a wider war with Russia.
Putin last year sent then defence minister Sergei Shoigu, now his top security aide, to Novaya Zemlya, a remote Arctic archipelago where Soviet nuclear tests were conducted in the Cold War.
This was meant to indicate that the Kremlin is ready “if necessary” to conduct new nuclear tests for the first time since 1990.
Putin’s former space agency chief Dmitry Rogozin has also demanded tests are carried out at Novaya Zemlya.
The Tsar Bomba – the most powerful nuclear bomb ever detonated – was tested there in October 1961.
The explosion was so large that it caused shock waves which circled the Earth multiple times, and its mushroom cloud rocketed more than 37 miles into the sky.
“We must make sure that [the West’s] buttocks begin to shake with fear,” he said.
Meanwhile Putin’s chief lapdog Dmitry Medvedev yesterday threatened to “sink” the UK with hypersonic missiles.
This came as Starmer left the White House following talks with Biden without a public US commitment to allow Ukraine to fire Storm Shadow or other long range missiles over enemy lines.
Their White House summit came as Russia kicked out six British diplomats over claims of “spying”.
The Foreign Office slammed the accusations as “completely baseless”.
Russia sees Britain as leading the Western charge demanding the use of long-range weapons, with other countries far more reluctant.
