© Reuters. FILE PHOTO: Russian President Vladimir Putin delivers his speech dedicated to Defender of the Fatherland Day in Moscow, Russia, in this image released February 23, 2023. Sputnik/Mikhail Metzel/Pool via REUTERS
By Guy Faulconbridge
MOSCOW (Reuters) – President Vladimir Putin has characterized the confrontation with the West over the Ukraine war as an existential battle for the survival of Russia and the Russian people, saying he was forced to reckon with NATO’s nuclear capabilities.
A year after ordering the invasion of Ukraine, Putin increasingly portrays the war as a defining moment in Russian history and says he believes the future of Russia and its people is in jeopardy.
“They have one goal: to dissolve the former Soviet Union and its fundamental part, the Russian Federation,” Putin told Rossiya 1 state television in an interview recorded on Wednesday but broadcast on Sunday.
NATO and the West dismiss that narrative, saying their goal is to help Ukraine fend off unprovoked attack.
Putin said the West wanted to divide Russia and then control the world’s biggest producer of raw materials, a move, he said, that could well lead to the destruction of many of Russia’s peoples, including the ethnic Russian majority.
“I don’t even know if an ethnic group like the Russian people will be able to survive in the form in which it exists today,” Putin said. He said the West’s plans had been put in writing, though he did not specify where.
The United States has denied that it wants to destroy Russia, while President Joe Biden has warned that a conflict between Russia and NATO could spark World War III, while also saying that Putin should not stay in power.
Putin said the tens of billions of dollars in US and European military assistance to Ukraine showed Russia was now up against NATO itself, the Cold War nightmare for Soviet and Western leaders alike.
Ukraine says it will not rest until the last Russian soldier is expelled from Ukraine, including from Crimea, which Russia annexed in 2014.
RUSSIA
Putin’s existential framing of the war allows the 70-year-old Kremlin chief to prepare the Russian people for a much deeper conflict, while also allowing him much greater freedom in the types of weapons some might use. day.
Russia’s official nuclear doctrine allows the use of nuclear weapons if they – or other types of weapons of mass destruction – are used against it, or if conventional weapons are used, which endanger “the very existence of the state”.
Putin has signaled that he is ready to break the nuclear arms control architecture, including the great powers’ moratorium on nuclear testing, unless the West backs down on Ukraine.
On Tuesday, he sought to underscore Russia’s resolve in Ukraine by suspending a landmark nuclear arms control treaty, announcing that new strategic systems had been put into combat service and warning that Moscow could resume nuclear tests.
Putin said that Russia would only resume discussion once French and British nuclear weapons were also taken into account.
Russia, which inherited nuclear weapons from the Soviet Union, has the world’s largest stockpile of nuclear warheads. It has more nuclear warheads than the United States, France and Great Britain combined, according to the Federation of American Scientists.
“In the current conditions, when all the major NATO countries have declared that their main objective is to inflict a strategic defeat on us, so that our people suffer as they say, how can we ignore their nuclear capabilities in these conditions?” Putin said.
Putin said that the biggest result of the past year was the unity of the Russian people.
(Reuters reporting, editing by Guy Faulconbridge and Tomasz Janowski)