President Vladimir Putin said Thursday the world was living in a dangerous moment and warned the West not to escalate the standoff over Ukraine by threatening the country. Russian enclave of Kaliningrad, which Moscow has made clear it will defend with nuclear weapons if necessary.
Locked in a war in Ukraine which he says Russia had no choice but to jump in to ensure his own safety, Putin said Russia did not intend to attack any European country and wanted to coexist peacefully.
But he reiterated that Moscow would resort to every weapon in its arsenal, including nuclear weapons, if its westernmost territory – Kaliningrad, wedged between Poland and Lithuania – was threatened.
“If it is a direct attack on the Russian Federation – in this case we are talking about Kaliningrad, and perhaps also other territories – the question of Russian A federation deploying all the weapons available to our country will of course inevitably and immediately be on the agenda.,” Putin told the Valdai Forum of the international community Russia experts in Moscow.
“It’s inevitable,” he said.
Putin said Russia realized that he would face “an enemy (NATO) twice as big as us”.
“And we will have to use our competitive advantages in this fight. Yes, of course, France and Britain are nuclear powers – we fully understand this and are fully aware of it,” he said. “But no one else has the kind of weapons that Russia has today. This is our competitive advantage. »
Nuclear alert
Putin’s comments followed a diplomatic note that NATO said this week it had received from Russiawarning the Western military alliance that it would be prepared to resort to nuclear weapons if NATO attempted to cut Russiathe Baltic exclave.
RussiaMoscow’s warning highlighted Moscow’s urgent concern over what it portrays as a growing NATO threat to Kaliningrad, a heavily militarized region. Russiaa territory slightly larger than the US state of Connecticut. NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte said the alliance responded by emphasizing that it was a defensive alliance and that nuclear threats were unhelpful.
Relations, already dire since Putin’s decision to send troops to Ukraine in 2022, have deteriorated this year, with European governments accusing Moscow of escalating “hybrid warfare” on the continent through acts such as sabotage and arson.
Russia denies this and rejects repeated statements by Western politicians that it is preparing for a possible military attack on a NATO country.
Putin warned that cycles of escalation in international conflicts could quickly lead to dangerous scenarios.
“We must understand that the moment when nothing can be changed can come very quickly and unexpectedly for everyone. The logic of increasing and harsher retaliatory measures leads to a fatal point of no return,” he said.
“At the heart of this escalation is arrogance and overconfidence. It is a path that leads to the brink of the abyss. Even more so today, when the arsenals of the world’s leading powers contain weapons capable of destroying all life or, at the very least, reducing the Earth to a catastrophic state,” Putin said.
“Can we be sure that these weapons will never be used? Of course not. We must keep this in mind and avoid such an outcome,” he added.
Putin, who said he was ready for a trilateral meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping and US President Donald Trump if a proper agenda was first developed, ruled out the idea of stopping Russian strikes against Ukrainian targets in the Black Sea region, while recognizing that Ukrainian strikes against oil refineries across Russia had cost Russia 1% of its gross domestic product (GDP).
He said Russia now responded to Ukraine in the same way.
But while it provided Western assistance to Kyiv when it came to launching strikes deep inside Russia As a future threat, he said Moscow was not planning to attack arms factories in Europe that supplied Ukraine “tomorrow.”
Gn world
