Putin Frames Illegal Annexation as Part of
Existential Battle With West
RIGHT NOW
Ukraine submits application to join NATO, with big hurdles ahead.
Putin on Friday asserted that Russia would take control of four Ukrainian regions and decried the United States for “Satanism"...
...Even by Putin’s increasingly antagonistic standards, the speech was extraordinary, a combination of bluster and menace that mixed conspiratorial riffs against the American-led “neocolonial system” with an appeal to the world to see Russia as the leader of an uprising against American power.
“Not only do Western elites deny national sovereignty and international law,” he said in the 37-minute address. “Their hegemony has a pronounced character of totalitarianism, despotism and apartheid.”
He sounds like 45th, doesn't he? Seriously. Or vice versa. Up is down, truth is lie.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky responded to Mr. Putin’s speech on Friday by announcing that he was fast-tracking his country’s application to the NATO alliance. [NO! JUST SAY NO TO VOLO IN NATO.] In a video, he accused the Kremlin of trying to “steal something that does not belong to it.” “Ukraine will not allow that,” he said.
That's 45th, too!
Putin insisted that Russia’s position on annexing the four territories was nonnegotiable, adding that the country would defend them “with all the forces and means at our disposal.”
“I call on the Kyiv regime to immediately cease fire and all military action,” he said, and for the Ukrainian government “to return to the negotiating table.”
He is deranged.
“But we will not discuss the decision of the people of Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson,” he went on, referring to the four Ukrainian regions being annexed. “It has been made. Russia will not betray it.”
The old Soviet doctrine of what's ours is ours and what's yours is negotiable.
Putin cast the conflict with the West in even more severe terms than in previous speeches...
“The repression of freedom is taking on the outlines of a ‘reverse religion,’ of real Satanism”...
Putin offered few new details on the matter that is now perhaps of greatest concern in Western capitals — whether, and at what point, he may be prepared to use weapons of mass destruction to force Ukraine to capitulate. His spokesman said earlier in the day that after the annexation of the four regions — a move that virtually no other country is expected to recognize — an attack on those regions would be treated as an attack on Russia.
...Putin hinted that the role of nuclear
weapons in war is on his mind. ...[He] noted that the United
States was the only country to have used nuclear weapons in war. He then
added: “By the way, they created a precedent.”