LONDON, Sept 21 (Reuters) - President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday ordered Russia's first mobilisation since World War Two and backed a plan to annex swathes of Ukraine, warning the West he was not bluffing when he said he'd be ready to use nuclear weapons to defend Russia.
In the biggest escalation of the Ukraine war since Moscow's Feb. 24 invasion, Putin explicitly raised the spectre of a nuclear conflict, approved a plan to annex a chunk of Ukraine the size of Hungary, and called up 300,000 reservists.
"If the territorial integrity of our country is threatened, we will without doubt use all available means to protect Russia and our people - this is not a bluff," Putin said in a televised address to the nation.
It is Putin doctrine that the parts of Ukraine he seized, Crimea in 2014, this Hungary-sized area today, are part of Russia; therefore, the nuclear threat he issued today extends to all captured territory and any attempts by Ukraine or the West to prise those territories back to Ukraine.
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A Cornered Vladimir Putin Is More Dangerous
Than Ever
And I say to my American friends the same about 45th. His alliance with QAnon nazis is not a sign of weakness but of great, impending danger.
[In his] menacing televised address on Wednesday...[Putin] said Russia would support imminent referendums in four regions of Ukraine on whether to join Russia — votes denounced by Ukraine and the West as a sham, and a likely prelude to annexation.
Okay pause: I just looked at who the reporter is on this piece: Roger Cohen. When Cohen writes about danger abroad, whether of Scottish independence, of Marie Le Pen in France, of his grandfather hiding under his bed in Lithuania, you have to judge for yourself whether he has taken his psychotropic meds. So far so good. Unpause.
He warned the West in unmistakable terms — “this is not a bluff” — that the attempt to weaken or defeat Russia could provoke nuclear cataclysm.
Reuters and AP are consistent.
Rattling his nuclear saber...Putin cornered is Mr. Putin at his most dangerous. ...
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The Kremlin has signaled that if it absorbs that territory, the Ukrainian counter-offensives underway in the east and south to recapture territory seized by Russia would be considered attacks on Russian soil, justifying any level of retaliation, up to and including a nuclear response.
Yes, absolutely true.
“If the territorial integrity of our country is threatened, we will of course use all means at our disposal to defend Russia and our people,” Putin said.
His speech, which may of course be a bluff despite his denial, nevertheless placed before the West a dilemma that has been inherent in its policy from the start of the war: How far can intense military and logistical support of Ukraine — effectively everything short of NATO troops on the ground — go without setting off nuclear confrontation?
I don't think Putin is bluffing. This is doctrinal for him. And Cohen is correct that the West has walked a line that does not in fact exist, under the law of war it is in league with Ukraine and is fair game for attack. Putin has withheld so far despite many nuclear references and threats but this I think is different. Repeating myself a third time, this is Russian doctrine. What's ours is ours and what's yours is negotiable and when we take it becomes ours and is nonnegotiable. Attacks to take back wrongfully seized territory in Ukraine are the same under doctrine to an attack on Moscow.
“I believe the nuclear threat is a bluff but it gives Putin a means to terrify the West, and accentuate divisions about providing arms because some may now view that as too dangerous,” said Sylvie Bermann, a former French ambassador to Russia.
Here I am the paranoid one but if they are against you it is not unreasoning fear, it is reason based. As stated the West has been vulnerable since the first arms shipment and are more vulnerable now that its materiel has turned the tables on the battlefield.
Hours after the speech in Moscow, President Biden denounced Mr. Putin’s “overt nuclear threats” against Europe...he said the West would be “clear, firm and unwavering” in its resolve as it confronts Mr. Putin...
I don't think President Biden is bluffing either.
A game of brinkmanship has begun with the American and Russian leaders seeking to outmaneuver each other as the war festers. If Ukraine and its Western backers have the advantage for now, that edge is by no means secure.
All true.
...Perhaps not since the Cuban missile crisis six decades ago have American and Russian leaders confronted each other so explicitly and sharply on the danger of nuclear war.
True again.
As Olaf Scholz, the German chancellor, has said, the United States and its Western allies have been trying to use “all means possible” to help Ukraine “without creating an uncontrollable escalation.” But the risk of that escalation, possibly the start of World War III, just grew, because what constitutes a strike “inside Russia” may now be defined differently by Mr. Putin.
All true again.
Full of anger and venom, portraying Ukraine as the headquarters of neo-Nazis and the West as a giant engine of “Russophobia,” Mr. Putin appeared as deluded about the neighbor he attacked as he was in his Feb. 24 speech that announced the war.
He has downsized Russia’s military ambitions in Ukraine...without downsizing his obsessions over Russian humiliation at the breakup of the Soviet Union three decades ago.
...he accused the Ukrainian authorities, falsely, of genocide against ethnic Russians. He boasted of nuclear weapons that are “more advanced” than the West’s. He made wild allegations about the threat to Russia. He alluded, for example, to “statements by some high-ranking representatives of leading NATO states about the possibility and admissibility of using weapons of mass destruction — nuclear weapons — against Russia.”
There is no evidence of this.
The speeches came...days before an Italian election Sunday in which a far-right candidate, Giorgia Meloni, is the favorite. The European extreme right has generally been sympathetic to Moscow, although Ms. Meloni’s own position appears to be evolving.
I know nothing about the Italian election or Meloni but this article has been the chalk so far and Sweden--Sweden!--elected a right-wing coalition last week.
President Emmanuel Macron of France...mentioned in his speech on Tuesday to the United Nations...a dialogue [with Russia] judged necessary, he said, because “we seek peace.”
Not at any price, however. Mr. Macron’s position has hardened. He presented a stark picture of a world hovering on the brink of war and brutal division as a result of Russia’s “imperial” aggression.
He said the world was close to “an enlarged era of conflict, a permanent one, where sovereignty and security will be determined by force, by the size of armies.”
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“The situation is very dangerous because Putin is in a trap,” Ms. Bermann said.
Yes, and repeating again, as Trump is in a trap in the United States. The actions of neither are a sign of weakness.
