President Vladimir Putin has reminded countries planning to send troops to Ukraine that Russia has nuclear weapons that can strike them if they intervene in the war.

The veiled warning follows French President Emmanuel Macron’s pronouncements that he is not ruling out sending troops to Ukraine to help fight Russian invaders.

“They have announced the possibility of sending Western military contingents to Ukraine.... The consequences for possible interventionists will be much more tragic,” Putin said in his address to the nation in Moscow on Thursday.

“They should eventually realize that we also have weapons that can hit targets on their territory.

“Everything that the West comes up with creates the real threat of a conflict with the use of nuclear weapons, and thus the destruction of civilisation,” he said.

Reacting to Putin’s veiled warning, United States’ State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller told reporters on Thursday, “It is no way for the leader of a nuclear-armed state to speak.”

The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons also condemned Putin’s remarks.

“The ratcheting up of bellicose rhetoric over Ukraine needs to stop before it leads to a nuclear catastrophe,” Melissa Parke, executive director of the Nobel prize-winning International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons.

After a Ukrainian counter-offensive in the summer of 2023 failed to bring results, Kyiv is back on the defensive against Russian forces.

“The combat capacity of our armed forces has increased many times over,” he said, adding without providing details that his troops were “advancing confidently in a number of areas,” Putin said.