© Sputnik/Dmitry AstakhovRussian President Vladimir Putin during his annual address to the Federal Assembly at Gostiny Dvor in Moscow, Russia.
The Russian president said the escalatory rhetoric of US and EU officials betrays their lack of understanding of what is at stake
Western officials indulging in escalatory rhetoric should realize that they are effectively invoking the specter of an all-out nuclear war, Russian President Vladimir Putin warned in a speech to legislators in Moscow on Thursday. He also once again accused the West of instigating the Ukraine conflict.
Putin addressed the topic in the opening minutes of his annual state-of-the-nation speech, a key event in which the president declares his plans and priorities in a televised address to both houses of the Federal Assembly of Russia, the national legislature.
President Putin insisted that recent claims by Western officials, that Moscow is planning to attack NATO, are "nonsense." At the same time, those same nations are "selecting targets to conduct strikes on our territory," the Russian head of state claimed, adding that there is now talk of "deploying NATO military contingents to Ukraine."
Putin reminded would-be aggressors that all previous attempts to conquer Russia have ended in failure, warning that "now the consequences for potential invaders would be far more tragic." He pointed out that Russia has a massive nuclear arsenal, which is in a state of "complete readiness for guaranteed deployment."
"Everything that they are thinking up now, that they are scaring the world with, it all really poses the threat of a conflict involving nuclear weapons, and therefore, the destruction of civilization. Don't they understand this?"
The Russian president suggested that Western politicians making those escalatory remarks "have already forgotten what war is."
Unlike Russians, who have faced "difficult trials" in recent decades, Westerners apparently "think that these are just some cartoons," President Putin opined.
His remarks came after his French counterpart, Emmanuel Macron, toyed with the idea of a potential ground deployment of Western militaries to Ukraine while talking to reporters on Monday, saying "in terms of dynamics, we cannot exclude anything."
NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg hastened to emphasize that "there are no plans for NATO combat troops on the ground in Ukraine."
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, in turn, declared that there will be "no ground troops, no soldiers on Ukrainian soil, who are sent there by European or NATO countries" in the future.
The leaders of Poland, the Czech Republic, Sweden and Finland also chimed in with similar assurances.
Commenting on Macron's remark, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov warned that such a development would mean that "we have to talk not about the probability, but rather the inevitability" of an all-out military confrontation between NATO and Russia.
Comment:
1) From the same source:1 Mar, 2024 15:45
World War III possible - former French PM
Defeating Russia is essential and everything possible must be done to achieve that goal, Manuel Valls has said
The possibility of the Ukraine conflict escalating into World War III cannot be ruled out, former French Prime Minister Manuel Valls claimed on Thursday in an interview with the Europe-1 news channel.
According to Valls, the fate of the French people and others across Europe is "closely tied" to the hostilities between Moscow and Kiev, meaning they should "act much more decisively" to support Ukraine, including militarily.
"We cannot accept the hypothesis of a victory for Vladimir Putin which would represent the end of Ukrainian democracy and the strategic, military, political, and moral defeat of Europe," Valls stated.
"Defeating Russia is essential, and for that, we must act much more strongly and quickly, and not forbid anything," he added, apparently referring to French President Emmanuel Macron's recent comments that sending NATO troops to Ukraine should not be ruled out.
Following Macron's remarks earlier this week, a range of countries - including Poland, Germany, the US, Italy, the UK, and other NATO members - rejected the idea that they could deploy forces to Ukraine. The chief of the US-led bloc, Jens Stoltenberg, has also dismissed such a scenario.
Meanwhile, a public survey conducted by the French newspaper Le Figaro on Thursday also revealed that over two-thirds of French citizens disapproved of Macron's comments on a possible NATO deployment to Ukraine.
Nevertheless, Macron has doubled down on his remarks, insisting that they were "weighed, thought-through, and measured." So far, only two other NATO members, Estonia and Lithuania, have supported the French president, suggesting that sending troops to Ukraine should not be excluded.
Moscow has condemned Macron's statements, warning that the deployment of NATO forces to Ukraine would "inevitably" lead to a direct confrontation between Russia and the US-led alliance.
2) What to say, what to speculate?
It must be very frustrating to belong to a Western elite that in some corners might prefer to reduce the human population to what they think are sustainable levels, at least if some big changes are expected even if not widely known.
Quite a lot has been tried already: They tried mass injections, with some success, but many caught onto the game that was afoot. They try and keep trying global warming and green agenda, but the electric cars do not do well in cold weather and burn out too easily when they are not supposed to. World Economic Forum advertising you will be happy and own nothing has also been a bit of a miss. They try making farming difficult and succeed partially, but neither the farmers nor the people think that is a great idea. They get somebody to sabotage infrastructure, but a few figured out the number had increased beyond mere chance. Russia sanctions have worked well but not as advertised against Russia. War in Ukraine has been a success against the Ukrainians and their own citizens which are slowly, slowly, slowly catching up to what is going on, making fundraisers more difficult.
On the balance sheet, the continued strategy could be to keep trying using a wide selection of options, including pushing Russophobia. Do they wish to push that a bit more, get some conflict going that can help make living conditions even worse, blame Russia and be done with their opposition? Will people then get busy with their own suffering and not have time to worry about a bit of genocide here and there, or have the ability to oppose more authoritarian measures? Or is it rather that these strategies will backfire? Think of the opposition of Yemen to the war in Gaza. Sometimes suffering does not only make a lot of people weaker it can also make some objectively weak people using their remaining energy to reconsider their options including relating their own suffering to that of others.
This is not the end of speculations, after all how many would have imagined just five years ago that we would be where we are now? Will what we will live in five years from now be equally beyond our current imagination, even beyond our wildest imagination? How long might this trend continue?
And now they seem to be provoking Russia to use nuclear weapons…