Russian president Vladimir Putin has vowed to respond with "military-technical measures" if the West refuses to reduce its military presence in central and eastern Europe, amid growing fears that Moscow is planning another major attack on Ukraine.
While moving tens of thousands of troops towards its neighbour's border, Russia last week handed the US a list of sweeping demands that would bar Ukraine from Nato membership and force the alliance to withdraw multinational battalions from states that were republics or allies of the Soviet Union before it collapsed in 1991.
Mr Putin aired grievances of the past 30 years in a sometimes angry address to top military officers on Tuesday, lambasting the West for its actions in the Middle East, the Balkans, the Russian Caucasus – where he accused the US of aiding Islamist terrorists – and in central and eastern Europe, where he said Nato expansion and US missile bases posed a direct threat to Russia’s security.
“If this clearly aggressive policy of our western colleagues continues, we will take appropriate military-technical measures in response, and respond firmly to unfriendly steps,” Mr Putin declared.
‘Tension’
“What is happening now – this tension that is building in Europe – is their fault. At every step, Russia was forced to somehow respond, at every step the situation kept getting worse and worse... And so today we’re in this situation, when we’re forced to resolve something,” he added.
“They simply do what they want,” he said of the US. “But what they are doing on the territory of Ukraine now – or trying to do and going to do – is not thousands of kilometres away from our national border. This is at the doorstep of our home. They must understand that we simply have nowhere further to retreat.”
Mr Putin claimed the US planned to base missiles in Ukraine and help “extremists” attack areas of Russia “such as Crimea” – the Black Sea peninsula that the Kremlin annexed from Kiev in 2014, at the same time as it fomented a war in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine that has now killed 14,000 people.
US officials say they are willing to discuss some security issues with Russia, but Nato insists it will not give Moscow a veto on Kiev's membership or reduce its commitment to eastern states that joined the alliance to gain protection from the kind of invasions that Russia launched in Georgia in 2008 and then in Ukraine.
Security demands
The US and its allies suspect Russia may be preparing the ground for more military action by publishing its largely unrealistic security demands and ramping up anti-western and anti-Ukrainian propaganda on state media, and they fear that some sort of staged incident in eastern Ukraine could be the trigger.
Russian defence minister Sergei Shoigu said US mercenaries were now training Ukrainian troops and "radical armed groups" for "active hostilities" near the frontline in Donbas between government forces and Moscow-led separatists.
“To carry out a provocation, reserves of an unidentified chemical component were delivered to the cities of Avdiivka and Krasny Liman,” Mr Shoigu claimed, without giving further details.
