Thursday, January 16

President Vladimir Putin has threatened to make use of nuclear weapons if Western powers ship troopers to inside hanging distance of Russia.

His feedback on Thursday, in a state of the nation tackle, had been the form of remarks often uttered by Dmitry Medvedev, a Putin ally who served as Russia’s president from 2008-2012 and prime minister till turning into a high safety official in 2020.

Throughout the battle in Ukraine, Medvedev has warned of nuclear motion and penned numerous social media posts showering Western leaders and nations with slurs and threats.

“Medvedev used to write posts about the riders of the apocalypse in the style of [US filmmaker Quentin] Tarantino, and Putin brought his threats back to the limits of sanity,” Kyiv-based analyst Aleksey Kushch advised Al Jazeera.

Putin has now upped the ante, responding to French President Emmanuel Macron’s assumption on Monday {that a} deployment of European troops to Ukraine can’t be “ruled out”.

Putin issued his threats throughout his annual nationwide tackle – a fastidiously choreographed ceremony broadcast reside to be chopped into soundbites and quotes that Russian media will possible repeat and touch upon for days.

The West has “announced the possibility of sending Western military contingents to Ukraine,” Putin stated on Thursday. “The penalties for potential interventionists can be far more tragic.

“They should eventually realise that we also have weapons that can hit targets on their territory. Everything that the West comes up with creates the real threat of a conflict with the use of nuclear weapons, and thus the destruction of civilisation,” he stated.

Moscow has the world’s largest nuclear arsenal together with a brand new technology of hypersonic missiles and several other instances extra tactical nuclear weapons than the collective West.

“Now it is Putin who clearly draws a red line about using the nukes,” Kushch stated, including that Macron had probed Putin’s response on when Moscow can be able to launch the nukes.

‘Nothing new’

But to Boris Bondarev, a senior Russian diplomat who stop his job to protest towards Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, there was “nothing new” in Putin’s menacing diatribe.

The threats had been Putin’s “usual scares and a projection of his own unrealised desires on to the West,” Bondarev, who served within the United Nations workplace in Geneva till 2022, advised Al Jazeera.

This was not the primary time Moscow bared its tooth in a confrontation with the United States and Europe.

Soviet helmsman Nikita Khrushchev banged his shoe on the rostrum within the United Nations headquarters in New York in 1960 ranting about “toady American imperialism” and promising “further interventions”.

Two years later, Khrushchev provoked the Caribbean Missile Crisis that just about triggered a nuclear apocalypse.

Soviet leaders within the late Nineteen Seventies and early Eighties routinely hinted at the opportunity of a nuclear struggle till Mikhail Gorbachev began his perestroika reforms that prompted an indication of reduction within the West, however buried the USSR.

During the struggle in Ukraine, the Kremlin pulled out of nuclear arms management treaties with Washington in strikes that many predicted would begin a brand new arms race.

“This is not a bluff,” Putin stated in 2022 when saying the opportunity of a nuclear strike.

“Putin’s regime has not once used the scare of a nuclear war to frighten the West and convince it not to provide military aid to Ukraine,” Alisher Ilkhamov, head of Central Asia Due Diligence, a assume tank in London, advised Al Jazeera.

“In the past, the scare was usually voiced over by Medvedev and all sorts of propagandists, now it’s Putin’s turn to announce them,” he stated.

And it wasn’t Macron’s assumption that irked Putin – it was Ukraine’s success in hanging airfields, gasoline depots, warships and army planes deep in Russia and Russia-occupied areas, Ilkhamov stated.

So far, the West has been in a position to increase the stakes in offering more and more efficient weaponry to Ukraine and ignore the Kremlin’s threats, he stated.

And Putin will hen out of a direct duel as a result of Russia’s military-industrial potential is just too exhausted to help an all-out confrontation with NATO, he stated.

“The power of [both] sides is too unequal,” Ilkhamov stated. “Putin has nothing to lean on in the confrontation with the West. He understands it very well and won’t go farther beyond the scares.”

The widow of Russia’s most outspoken opposition chief supplied a helpful perception into how Putin points his threats and acts upon them.

“You’re dealing not with a politician but with a bloody monster. Putin is the head of an organised criminal group,” Yulia Navalnaya, whose husband Alexey Navalny died on February 16 in an Arctic jail, stated in a video on Wednesday.

“It’s impossible to harm Putin with yet another resolution or yet another batch of sanctions that are no different from previous ones. You can’t win over him thinking he is a man with principles, with morals and rules,” she stated.

INTERACTIVE-WHO CONTROLS WHAT IN UKRAINE-1709044724
(Al Jazeera)

During his speech, Putin appeared in denial about his personal position within the struggle that grinds into its third yr.

“I noticed during Putin’s speech that he said Russia did not start the war,” Ivar Dale, a senior coverage adviser with the Norwegian Helsinki Committee, a human rights group, advised Al Jazeera.

“He thought about the risks, he decided to do it, and he failed. The right thing to do now is to withdraw all troops from Ukraine, and not continue to threaten innocent people with a nuclear holocaust,” Dale stated.

Putin’s blackmail isn’t his first and possibly not his final, and the West ought to certainly deploy NATO troops to assist Ukraine, stated an knowledgeable on Eastern Europe.

“The emergence of Western servicemen in Ukraine will, of course, cross yet another ‘red line,’” Nikolay Mitrokhin of Germany’s Bremen University advised Al Jazeera.

“Although it would very much help Ukraine and give it a chance to free several brigades that are currently guarding the rear and the border with [breakaway and pro-Russian Moldovan region of] Transnistria.”

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/3/1/how-real-is-putins-threat-to-nuke-the-west?traffic_source=rss

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