Dmitry Medvedev, former Russian president and Deputy Chairman of its Security Council, has insisted Vladimir Putin is prepared to unleash nuclear weapons.

Russia’s threats to use nuclear weapons “is reality” and “not a scare tactic”, it says.

Dmitry Medvedev, former Russian president and Deputy Chairman of its Security Council, said if Russia fails to win its war with Ukraine “on our terms”, World War Three could be triggered and billions may die.

He accused western leaders of a “Neanderthal mindset and abysmal ignorance”, and warned they were “trying to push the world to the brink of nuclear apocalypse”.

He said: “Such a conflict would obliterate the entire history of human civilisation and plunge it back into a primitive state – assuming any of the planet’s billions of people survived at all.”

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