Which city should be Russia’s first target during WWIII? Putin’s ally suggests

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s ally recently named the city that he believes should be Moscow’s first target should World War III break out.

Andrey Gurulyov, a former deputy commander of Russia’s southern military district, made the comment during a discussion about Lithuania’s blockade of the neighboring Russian exclave of Kaliningrad while on Kremlin-backed television.

During his appearance Gurulyov warned of a missile strike on a European capital, naming the city. Moscow has threatened to retaliate after Vilnius enforced sanctions on embargoed goods transiting and entering the Russian Baltic Sea territory.

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Gurulyov raised the prospect of invading the Baltic with the Lithuanian capital Vilnius being the first target. 

Both Estonia and Lithuania are NATO countries and any invasion by Russia would trigger Article 5, potentially causing a Third World War.

“We’ll destroy the entire group of enemy’s space satellites during the first air operation, he told the program Vremya Pakazhet (Time will Tell) on Wednesday.

“No-one will care if they are American or British, we would see them all as NATO,” he said, adding, that Russia would then “mitigate the entire system of anti-missile defense” and that “we certainly won’t start from Warsaw, Paris or Berlin.

“The first to be hit will be London. Without doubt the threat to the world comes from the Anglo-Saxons,” he said.

He warned that Russia would target critically important sites that would cut off power to Europe, which will lead US to give a directive of continuing fighting “in the cold without food and electricity.”

A clip of the comments was shared by Ukrainian internal affairs adviser, Anton Gerashchenko.

“London is ‘first to be hit’ if WW3 starts, says Andrey Gurulyov, Putin’s close political ally. But what about the families of Russian politicians and oligarchs who live in #London?” Gerashchenko wrote. 

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Panelists on Russian state TV channels have made repeated threats of missile strikes against European countries that back Ukraine in its war with Putin’s army.

Gurulyov now serves as a deputy in Russia’s parliament in the ruling United Russia party. He reportedly has close ties to Vladimir Putin. He was one of the Duma deputies sanctioned by the United States Treasury sanctioned a month after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.