Russian state television has broadcasted an unsettling new threat, with a Duma politician boasting Russia could destroy the United States with four nukes.
While speaking on Russia's main TV channel, Rossiya 1, Alexei Zhuravlev insisted Russia is capable of eliminating the east and west coasts of the US.
"To destroy the entire east coast of the US, two Sarmat missiles are necessary and two missiles for the West coast," he told political figure and talk show host Yevgeny Popov.
"Four missiles and there'll be nothing left."
Zhuravlev said the cloud of debris, known as a mushroom, would be so large it could be visible from Mexico.
A Sarmat missile is a new nuclear-capable intercontinental ballistic missile that Russia test-launched in April for the first time after years of development.
The threat comes after a CBS News piece discussed what a nuclear strike on New York would look like, which Zhuravlev said was undercalculated.
"Guys, you're so funny. What methods are they even using?" Zhuravlev said.
"Don't delude yourselves. What should be said is that there'll be nothing left, no one harbours any illusions about it.
"That everyone will be fine in case of nuclear war, no one will be fine, but calculate it correctly."
Zhuravlev then started to discuss how many Ukrainians need to be 'de-Nazified', reaching the conclusion about two million so-called Nazis need to be killed.
"These 2 million people either should have left Ukraine, or they should be denazified, in other words, destroyed. No more than that."
The rhetoric Russia is portraying is that the invasion of Ukraine is a special military operation to rid Ukraine of neo-Nazis.
Russia launched a full-scale attack on Ukraine on February 24.
Russian troops are currently targeting the last major population centre still held by Ukrainian forces in the eastern Luhansk province, entering the outskirts of the city of Sievierodonetsk.
Russian forces now controlled between a third and half of the city. Russia's separatist proxies acknowledged that capturing it was taking longer than hoped, despite one of the biggest ground assaults of the war.
