ST. PETERSBURG, December 24. /TASS/. Former Austrian Foreign Minister Karin Kneissl said she believes Europe ignored the message that Russia sent with its test of the Oreshnik intermediate-range missile.
"I regret they have not understood the signal because the signal was Russia doesn’t want to trigger any nuclear war. There’s more in the arsenal and the Oreshnik rocket has the energy of a nuclear weapon but it is not nuclear," said the former diplomat, who now heads the Geopolitical Observatory of Russia’s Key Issues, or GORKI, at St. Petersburg State University.
"And they have not understood the signal because they continue to attack all sorts of Russian cities, whether it the old or the new territories, and what I fear most is that there will be more sabotage, more acts of terrorism," she went on to say.
President Vladimir Putin said on November 21 that Russia fired its newest Oreshnik intermediate-range ballistic missile with a non-nuclear warhead at a Ukrainian defense industry plant called Yuzhmash in the city of Dnepr to retaliate for attacks on Russian military sites in the Kursk and Bryansk regions with UK and US missiles. The Russian president said the West could bring upon itself heavy consequences, should its inflammatory policies prompt further escalation of the conflict.