Putin Ally Announces First City Russia Will Strike if World War 3 Starts

A lawmaker in Russia has become the latest guest on Kremlin-backed television to warn of a missile strike on a European capital, naming the city that he believes should be Moscow's first target should World War Three 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.

Moscow has threatened to retaliate after Vilnius enforced sanctions of embargoed goods transiting and entering the Russian Baltic Sea territory.

Gurulyov dismissed the idea of supplying Kaliningrad by snatching a corridor from Belarus to Lithuania because Russian troops would be flanked on two sides by NATO.

Instead, he raised the prospect of invading the Baltic in his strategy which included reverting the Lithuanian capital Vilnius back to its former identity as Vilno, and Estonian capital Tallinn back to its tsarist identity as Reval.

Both Estonia and Lithuania are NATO countries and any invasion by Russia would trigger Article 5, potentially causing a Third World War, which Gurulyov said the west would have no stomach for.

"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 as he warned that Russia would target critically important sites that would cut off power to Europe.

He said that the U.S. would then have to tell western Europe to continue fighting "in the cold without food and electricity."

A clip of the comments was shared by Ukrainian internal affairs adviser, Anton Gerashchenko, who wrote, "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?"

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

This scenario of escalation has gained traction since Russia's successful test of the Sarmat intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) which TV guests have emphasized can reach London in two minutes. A direct confrontation between Moscow and NATO in the Ukraine war are frequent talking points.

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

He has expressed firebrand views before, telling another Kremlin propaganda channel Russia-1 this month that Russia was ready for a "big colossal war."