{"id":170493,"date":"2025-11-03T15:56:04","date_gmt":"2025-11-03T15:56:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/ukraine-russia-war-latest-trump-claims-moscow-is-carrying-out-secret-underground-nuclear-weapons-tests-the-independent\/"},"modified":"2025-11-03T15:56:04","modified_gmt":"2025-11-03T15:56:04","slug":"ukraine-russia-war-latest-trump-claims-moscow-is-carrying-out-secret-underground-nuclear-weapons-tests-the-independent","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/ukraine-russia-war-latest-trump-claims-moscow-is-carrying-out-secret-underground-nuclear-weapons-tests-the-independent\/","title":{"rendered":"Ukraine-Russia war latest: Trump claims Moscow is carrying out \u2018secret\u2019 underground nuclear weapons tests – The Independent"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Trump told reporters he was N\u2019not really\u201d considering a deal to sell Tomahawk missiles to Ukraine, but could change his mind
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Donald Trump<\/a> has said that Russia<\/a> is carrying out \u201cunderground\u201d nuclear weapons<\/a> tests as he doubled down on his announcement last week that the US would restart their own nuclear testing.
Speaking to Norah O\u2019Donnell on 60 Minutes, <\/em>he said that \u201cRussia’s testing, and China’s testing, but they don’t talk about it\u201d, adding they were doing them \u201cunderground where people don’t know exactly what’s happening with the test.\u201d
When Ms O\u2019Donnell tried to clarify if he meant that Russia and China were definitely testing their nuclear weapons, he said: \u201cRussia’s testing nuclear weapons.
\u201cRussia did make– a little bit of a threat the other day when they said they were gonna do certain forms of a different level of testing.\u201d
It comes after he has now backed away from the idea of giving Tomahawk<\/a> missiles to Ukraine<\/a> for carrying out strikes inside Russia, at least for now. Trump has publicly toyed with the idea of providing the long-range missiles to Ukraine, saying that Volodymyr Zelensky would like him to add Tomahawks to Kyiv<\/a>‘s arsenal. Tomahawk missiles have a range of 2,500km, enough to strike deep inside Russia, including Moscow.
Kyiv\u2019s troops have advanced further near Dobropillia, north of Pokrovsk, Ukraine\u2019s army chief has said.
It comes as the Russian Defence Ministry has claimed that its forces had advanced in the Ukrainian city of Pokrovsk and had carried out massive strikes overnight on Ukrainian military-industrial sites.
Ukraine\u2019s military units are competing with each other by launching deadly drone attacks to earn points that can be used to buy more weapons.
The video game style rewards system is proving to be very popular, Ukraine\u2019s first deputy prime minister said, with hundreds of units participating. Launched a year ago, it is now being expanded to reconnaissance, artillery and logistics operations<\/a>, according to reports.
Read more here:<\/em><\/strong>
Russia wants to take the whole of the Donbas region, which comprises the Luhansk and Donetsk provinces. Ukraine still controls about 10% of Donbas – an area of about 5,000 square km (1,930 square miles) in western Donetsk.
Capturing Pokrovsk, dubbed “the gateway to Donetsk” by Russian media, and Kostiantynivka to its northeast which Russian forces are also trying to envelop, would give Moscow a platform to drive north towards the two biggest remaining Ukrainian-controlled cities in Donetsk – Kramatorsk and Sloviansk. It would also give Moscow its most important single territorial gain inside Ukraine since it took the ruined city of Avdiivka in early 2024.
Russian President Vladimir Putin says Donbas is now legally part of Russia. Kyiv and most Western nations reject Moscow’s seizure of the territory as an illegal land grab. Some Western military analysts, like Rob Lee, a senior fellow at the U.S.-based Foreign Policy Research Institute, say that capturing Pokrovsk would hand Russia an important win, especially if it can do it by the end of the year.
But though important for operational reasons, Lee says taking Pokrovsk would still leave Russia a lot of work to do when it came to taking control of the rest of Donetsk and the two important fortress cities of Kramatorsk and Sloviansk.
The Tomahawk<\/a> cruise missile has been in the US military\u2019s inventory since the 1980s. While slow by missile standards, the cruise missile flies around 100 feet (about 30 meters) off the ground, making it harder to detect by defence systems.
The missile also boasts an impressive range of around 1,000 miles and precision guidance systems that make it the go-to weapon for striking targets that are deep inland or in hostile territory. The long-range nature of the missiles would put Moscow in Ukraine\u2019s range, a significant threat to Russia.
Questions have been raised about how Tomahawks could be employed in Ukraine. They are launched almost exclusively from ships or submarines and Ukraine doesn\u2019t possess a Navy with ships capable of carrying the 20-foot-long missile.
The US Army has been developing a platform to launch the missile from the ground, but some experts have that the capability was still far from ready, even for US forces.
Multiples countries in the alliance have reported incursions by drones into their airspace in recent months, James C. Reynolds<\/strong><\/a> reports.
Read more here:<\/em><\/strong>
China\u2019s premier Li Qiang has met with Russia\u2019s prime minister Mikhail Mishustin, according to Chinese state media.
Mishustin has arrived in China for a two-day visit that includes meetings with president Xi Jinping<\/a> and premier Li Qiang.
Li has said that China and Russia are good \u201cneighbours\u201d with mutual trust, as he met Mishustin.
Estonia\u2019s foreign affairs ministry has said that a Russian coast guard boat flying a Wagner mercenary flag was spotted near the country.
The country suggested that the display of a symbol of the mercenary group that rebelled against the Kremlin two years ago “confirms the fact that Russia’s ‘iron’ system is fracturing”.
The Wagner company, led by late oligarch Yevgeny Prigozhin, fought in some of the hardest battles against Ukraine before staging an uprising against Moscow in June 2023. Prigozhin later died in a mysterious plane crash months after agreeing an end to the rebellion.
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Notifications can be managed in browser preferences.Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged inPlease refresh your browser to be logged inSwipe for next article Trump told reporters he was N\u2019not really\u201d considering a deal to sell Tomahawk missiles to Ukraine, but could change his mindFrom reproductive […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":170494,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-170493","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-us","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/170493","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=170493"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/170493\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/170494"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=170493"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=170493"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=170493"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}