President Barack Obama isn’t going out quietly. With just over a month remaining in his second-term, the president has deemed now an appropriate time to retaliate over wild accusations that Russia was responsible for hacking the United States presidential election.

He’s announced his intention to launch a cyber attack on the nuclear-armed Russia — and it threatens to bring the United States to the brink of war with our former Cold War adversary.

Even worse, Obama claims to of had prior knowledge of Russia’s alleged role in the email hacking, but held onto the information without action because he was confident Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton would win the election, according to NBC.

Now that his party lost the White House, Obama has promised to retaliate against Russia, even though the Kremlin has vehemently denied the accusation.

Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov called the accusations baseless and inappropriate.

“They should either stop talking about that, or produce some proof at last,” Peskov told reporters Friday. “Otherwise it all begins to look unseemly.”

Critics have attacked the President for withholding this evidence he claims to have, assailing he should have acted on the information regardless of his predicted outcome of the election.

His job as the President is to protect our nation from foreign attacks, critics say – period. If he has evidence of one, that should of been the only factor in determining whether to retaliate.

Not sour grapes over an election.

Some even argue Obama doesn’t have the proof he claims to possess, and the move is just another bold-faced lie in an attempt to undermine the legitimacy of the presidential election.

As the White House grew more bullish about suggesting President Vladimir Putin was personally involved, Obama said he’d spoken directly to Putin about his concerns about Russian meddling. He said whenever a foreign government tries to interfere in U.S. elections, the nation must take action “and we will at a time and place of our own choosing.”

“We have been working hard to make sure that what we do is proportional, that what we do is meaningful,” Obama said in an NPR News interview airing Friday.

Obama’s remarks were the clearest indication that whatever response the U.S. is planning, it hasn’t happened yet. The White House has insisted for months that when the U.S. did retaliate, it might not be made public, a position that has created uncertainty about the strength and timing of any response.

There has been no specific, persuasive evidence shared publicly about the extent of Putin’s role or knowledge of the hackings. That lack of proof undercuts Democrats’ strategy to portray Putin’s involvement as irrefutable evidence of a directed Russian government plot to undermine America’s democratic system.

But the White House pointed to a U.S. intelligence assessment released publicly in October that asserted “only Russia’s senior-most officials could have authorized these activities.”

“I don’t think things happen in the Russian government of this consequence without Vladimir Putin knowing about it,” Obama’s deputy national security adviser, Ben Rhodes, told MSNBC.

Trump struck back Friday morning, with a Twitter post mockingly asking “are we talking about the same cyberattack” in which embarrassing information about the Democratic National Committee was also revealed. His tweet invoked emails stolen from Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman and later released publicly in hacking that has been linked to Russia.

In the NPR interview, Obama sough to contrast the current incident with “a traditional understanding that everybody’s trying to gather intelligence on everybody else.”

“One of the things we’re going to have to do over the next decade,” he said, is find an international understanding on rules involving what has become “a new game.” Obama said that U.S. officials should not let “the inter-family argument between Americans” obscure the need for people to “stand together” on this issue.

“My view is that this is not a partisan issue,” the president said, exhorting people to “take it out of election season and move it into governing season.”

The explosive accusation suggests Putin, the leader of perhaps America’s greatest geopolitical foe, as having directly undermined U.S. democracy. U.S. officials have not contended, however, that Trump would have been defeated by Clinton on Nov. 8 if not for Russia’s assistance. Nor has there has been any indication of tampering with the vote-counting.

The dispute over Russia’s role has also fueled an increasingly public spat between Obama’s White House and Trump’s team that is threatening to spoil the delicate truce that Obama and Trump have forged since Election Day to smooth the billionaire businessman’s move to the White House in little over a month.

Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s senior transition adviser, said it was “breathtaking” and irresponsible that the White House had suggested Trump knew Russia was interfering to help his campaign.

The Associated Press contributed to this article.