Trump orders US nuclear subs repositioned over ex-Russian leader's statements
Mr Trump posted on his social media site that based on the 'highly provocative statements' from Mr Medvedev he had 'ordered two Nuclear Submarines to be positioned in the appropriate regions, just in case these foolish and inflammatory statements are more than just that'.
The president added: 'Words are very important, and can often lead to unintended consequences, I hope this will not be one of those instances.'
It was not immediately clear what impact Mr Trump's order would have on US nuclear subs, which are routinely on patrol in the world's hotspots, but it comes at a delicate moment in the Trump administration's relations with Moscow.
Mr Trump has said that special envoy Steve Witkoff is heading to Russia to push Moscow to agree to a ceasefire in its war with Ukraine and has threatened new economic sanctions if progress is not made.
He cut his 50-day deadline for action to 10 days, with that window set to expire next week.
The post about the sub repositioning came after Mr Trump, in the wee hours of Thursday morning, had posted that Mr Medvedev was a 'failed former president of Russia' and warned him to 'watch his words'.
Mr Medvedev responded hours later by writing: 'Russia is right on everything and will continue to go its own way.'
Asked as he was leaving the White House on Friday evening for a weekend at his estate in New Jersey about where he was repositioning the subs, Mr Trump did not offer any specifics.
'We had to do that. We just have to be careful,' the president said. 'A threat was made, and we didn't think it was appropriate, so I have to be very careful.'
Mr Trump also said 'I do that on the basis of safety for our people' and 'we're gonna protect our people' and later added of Mr Medvedev: 'He was talking about nuclear.'
'When you talk about nuclear, we have to be prepared,' Mr Trump said. 'And we're totally prepared.'
Mr Medvedev was president from 2008 to 2012 while Russian President Vladimir Putin was barred from seeking a second consecutive term but stepped aside to let him run again.
Now deputy chairman of Russia's National Security Council, which Mr Putin chairs, Mr Medvedev has been known for his provocative and inflammatory statements since the start of the war in 2022, a U-turn from his presidency, when he was seen as liberal and progressive.
He has frequently wielded nuclear threats and lobbed insults at Western leaders on social media.
Some observers have argued that with his extravagant rhetoric, Mr Medvedev is seeking to score political points with Mr Putin and Russian military hawks.
Mr Trump and Mr Medvedev have gotten into online spats before.
On July 15, after Mr Trump announced plans to supply Ukraine with more weapons via its Nato allies and threatened additional tariffs against Moscow, Mr Medvedev posted, 'Trump issued a theatrical ultimatum to the Kremlin. The world shuddered, expecting the consequences. Belligerent Europe was disappointed. Russia didn't care'.
Earlier this week, he wrote: 'Trump's playing the ultimatum game with Russia: 50 days or 10″ and added, 'He should remember 2 things: 1. Russia isn't Israel or even Iran. 2. Each new ultimatum is a threat and a step towards war. Not between Russia and Ukraine, but with his own country.'
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Times
25 minutes ago
- Times
Business live: Wall Street banks warn of market correction
Oil prices remained lower after output increases by Opec+ aimed at regaining market share and threats by President Trump to raise tariffs on India over its Russian petroleum purchases. The benchmark Brent crude futures contract is down 0.28 per cent to $68.57 a barrel this morning, its lowest level in a week. India is the biggest buyer of seaborne Russian crude. Trump wants the country to stop buying Russian oil as Washington seeks ways to push Moscow for a peace deal with Ukraine. He is threatening to impose 100 per cent secondary tariffs on buyers of Russian crude. Trump wrote on Truth Social: 'India is not only buying massive amounts of Russian Oil, they are then, for much of the Oil purchased, selling it on the Open Market for big profits. They don't care how many people in Ukraine are being killed by the Russian War Machine. Because of this, I will be substantially raising the Tariff paid by India to the USA.' Some Wall Street banks are warning clients to prepare for a market pullback, even as Wall Street indices rebounded from last week's sell-off. Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank and Evercore all cautioned that the S&P 500 index is due for a near-term drop due to the fallout from President Trump's trade war, including slowing consumer spending, weaker economic growth, higher unemployment and potentially rising inflation. Mike Wilson, the Morgan Stanley strategist, forecasts a correction of up to 10 per cent this quarter, while Evercore's Julian Emanuel is expecting as much as 15 per cent. For now stock markets seem unfazed. Shares in Asia rose for a second day. Japan's Nikkei gained 0.6 per cent, supported by data showing a jump in the nation's service sector activity in July. Meanwhile, mainland China's SSE Composite gained 0.5 per cent after services activity expanded at its fastest pace in 14 months in July. The FTSE 100 is forecast to open 30 points higher when trading begins.
Reuters
28 minutes ago
- Reuters
Indian shares inch lower as investors assess Trump's tariff threat
Aug 5 (Reuters) - India's equity benchmarks inched lower on Tuesday after U.S. President Donald Trump renewed his threat of harsh tariffs on goods from India over the country's purchases of Russian oil. The Nifty 50 (.NSEI), opens new tab fell 0.31% to 24,646.95 points and the BSE Sensex (.BSESN), opens new tab lost 0.36% to 80,737.93 as of 9:38 a.m. IST. Trump on Monday threatened higher tariffs on imports from India, prompting New Delhi to call the move "unjustified" and pledge to safeguard its economic interests, further straining trade ties between the two nations. Analysts said the ongoing trade tensions have dampened market sentiment, keeping benchmarks rangebound until there is clarity on U.S. tariffs. Ten of the 16 major sectors declined, while broader small-cap and mid-cap indexes were little changed. Index heavyweights HDFC Bank ( opens new tab fell 1.1% while Reliance Industries ( opens new tab and ICICI Bank ( opens new tab lost about 0.8% each. "Markets have seen a subdued start as the fresh threat by the U.S. government to substantially raise tariffs on India weighed," said Prashanth Tapse, senior vice president of research at Mehta Equities. Trump's threat to raise tariffs on India over Russian oil is a major risk, which could hit exports harder than expected, dent fiscal year 2026 growth and earnings, said three analysts. "Domestic markets will likely continue to see bouts of intraday volatility and nervousness amongst the investors," Tapse said. Among individual stocks, private lender IndusInd Bank climbed 4.7% after naming industry veteran Rajiv Anand as its chief executive for a three-year term. Siemens Energy ( opens new tab rose 2% after posting a rise in the June quarter profit. Butterfly Gandhimathi Appliances ( opens new tab jumped 8% after its first-quarter profit more than doubled on a year-on-year basis. On the flipside, Triveni Turbine < dropped 7% after reporting a fall in the June quarter profit.
New Statesman
an hour ago
- New Statesman
It's time for angry left populism
Illustration by Rebecca Hendin / Ikon Images 'Populism, I'm very sceptical of,' said Adrian Ramsay in the New Statesman's Green Party leadership hustings. 'I… don't want to see the kind of politics you get from populism which often brings about a divisive, polarising approach: Green politics is about bringing people together, respecting different views, having respectful discussion,' added the MP, and current party co-leader. On the contrary, countered Zack Polanski, the party's current deputy and London Assembly member, who's running for the top job promising 'bold leadership' and 'eco-populism'. 'Populism just means the 99 per cent vs the 1 per cent,' he said. He was reviving the old slogan of the Occupy movement. But he was also stating a clear position on a debate which has wracked the intellectual left for more than a decade. If Polanski's right, and if he wins, then there's more at stake than the leadership of England's fifth party. Should they adopt the attitude of their insurgent new political star, then the Greens have an opportunity to change the political climate in Britain, pointing the way to a durable populism of the political left. It's not just the Green Party; a similar phenomenon is emerging across civil society. Under newish, millennial co-directors, Greenpeace UK have adopted an angrier, anti-elite tone. 'Did you know that one of the richest billionaires in the UK is destroying our oceans with plastic?' the NGO asked in one recent online post, linking a traditionally soft-focus issue to spikier class politics. The most significant academic advocates of left-populism have been the Belgian political scientist Chantal Mouffe and her late husband and academic collaborator, the Argentine philosopher Ernesto Laclau. They saw populism as 'a political strategy based around constructing a frontier' between the privileged and the downtrodden, and 'appealing to the mobilization of the 'underdog' against 'those in power''. Mouffe argued that neoliberalism has impoverished not just the working class, but also the middle class, has depoliticised the bulk of the population, and produced what she calls 'oligarchisation' – that is, both radical wealth inequality, and also the political dominance of a growing international billionaire class. This context, she argued in 2016, produced a 'populist moment', one which led to radical political changes on right and left: as well as Trump, Brexit and (later) Johnson, there were Corbynism, Syriza, Bernie Sanders, Podemos, and Jean Luc Mélenchon. Even the more successful centrists of that era – Emmanuel Macron (during his first election) and Nicola Sturgeon – painted themselves as direct opponents of 'those in power'. Nearly a decade later, much of that post-2008 context remains, to which we could add the surge in anxiety about the environmental crisis in 2019, the anger with elites which emerged from the pandemic, and the daily nausea millions of us feel watching a Western-backed genocide livestreamed through our phones. In this context it's absolutely vital, as Mouffe argues, that the left try to mobilise the overwhelming majority of people together against that oligarch class and those in power who protect them. Doing so will require telling clear political stories about the world, which express the tension between 'us' – the majority of people – and 'them' – the oligarchs and their allies. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe This is not a time to tell citizens to 'calm down, dear'. It's a time to focus righteous rage into change. This will require rhetorically 'constructing a boundary' between 'the 99 per cent' and 'the 1 per cent' and their outriders on the right. It's drawing this boundary to which Ramsay and, in another debate, his running mate Ellie Chowns, object when they describe populism as 'polarising'. But any good story needs conflict and villains, and the real world has plenty for Polanski to point to. Oligarchs and their allies must be curtailed, and we're not going to do that by 'having respectful discussions' with them. Anger has to be focused upwards, or the political right will channel it down. In the context of environmental crisis, economic inequality becomes even more urgent. As Oxfam calculated in 2024, billionaires emit more carbon every three hours than the average British person does in a lifetime. The richest 1 per cent of humanity are responsible for more emissions than the poorest 66 per cent, and are increasingly insulating themselves from the impact of the disaster they've created, flitting around between air-conditioned mansions in private jets while the rest of us swelter. Despite this, Reform's fossil fuel financed anti-environmental populism has managed to rhetorically spin action on climate change – framed as the technocratic sounding 'net zero' – into an 'elitist' project, one which they can blame for rising energy bills, neatly deflecting blame from the fossil fuel industry and energy companies. As Polanski himself pointed out during the New Statesman debate, Ramsay is happy to call for a wealth tax, and clearly wants to curtail the oligarch class. So what's he's afraid of? Perhaps the most articulate intellectual opponent of populism is the Dutch social scientist Cas Mudde, who defines it as an ideology which divides society into two groups, 'the pure people' and 'the corrupt elite', and which regards politics as 'an expression of the general will of the people'. While he sees it has a role in bringing issues that elites don't want discussed to the fore, he worries that it ultimately undermines systems of liberal democracy. And it's this that Ramsay and Chowns really fear: if you channel anger at elites and the system which sustains them, you risk attacking those systems of democracy that we have, and replacing them not with more democracy, but less. But to me – certainly in Britain and the United States – this fear is itself dangerous. Britain has astonishingly low levels of trust in our political system for a simple reason: Westminster stinks. Too often, in Britain (as in America), the left ends up defending that system from right-wing attacks, because the right wants to replace it with authoritarianism, or market rule. Which means voters see us propping up an obviously rotten system, and turn to the right to replace it. This is how Trump won twice, it's how Johnson crushed Corbyn in 2019, and it's why Farage is ahead now. For an alternative strategy, look across the Channel. In France's 2024 legislative elections, the left-wing New Popular Front came first after making radical constitutional change a central message, promising an assembly to write a new constitution, and launch a sixth Republic. Progressives – including Greens – shouldn't fear hatred of our politics any more than we should worry about anger at our economic system, rage at rising bills, or horror at genocide in Gaza. We should express that collective fury, and channel it into serious ideas for the radical change we need. [Further reading: Are the Greens heading left?] Related
