Vladimir Putin has raised the spectre of nuclear conflagration in what he said would be a Russian response to risks posed by the West.
In a speech on Red Square to mark the Soviet Union’s victory in the second World War, the Russian president hailed soldiers fighting in his invasion of Ukraine and vowed to stand firm against western attempts to contain Russia.
“We reject any state or alliance’s exceptionalist pretences – we know what follows when these ambitions go unchecked,” Mr Putin said on Thursday in an apparent reference to Nato, which has expanded to include Sweden and Finland after his invasion of Ukraine.
“Russia will do everything not to allow a global conflict, but at the same time, we will not let anyone threaten us. Our strategic forces are always at combat readiness,” Mr Putin added, referring to Russia’s arsenal of nuclear weapons, the world’s largest.
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The parade of military hardware that then trundled past the Lenin mausoleum outside the Kremlin culminated with three RS-24 Yars intercontinental ballistic missile launchers, which Russia claims can strike any target across the globe.
Mr Putin’s latest warning to the West came at what the Russian leader feels is an inflection point more than two years into his full-scale war in Ukraine.
The Russian army is gradually advancing against Ukraine’s outgunned, outmanned troops who are struggling to hold their positions while they await the arrival of US weapons funded by a recently adopted $61 billion aid package.
But the Moscow parade, held in an unseasonal flurry of snow, also underscored the losses Russia’s own armed forces has sustained.
The only tank in the parade was the T-34, a legendary Soviet armoured vehicle from the second World War that traditionally opens it. Russia has lost more than 3,000 tanks during the war, as many as it had before the invasion, according to a February report by the International Institute for Strategic Studies.
Mr Putin told his troops in Ukraine that Russia was going through a “difficult-epoch-making period”, and said they enjoyed the whole country’s support.
In separate remarks to commanders fighting in Ukraine, which the Kremlin said were made a day earlier, he said Russia’s entire economic and social development depended on the invasion’s success. “We have every possibility of meeting these targets. But only under one condition – your successful work on the battlefield. This is the key link at the moment,” Mr Putin said.
Russia has sought to deter the US and its Nato allies from stepping up their support for Ukraine by making thinly veiled threats about its nuclear arsenal.
“The Yarses are floating across Red Square, and you can’t help remembering someone is planning to defeat us on the battlefield. You really want to ask them how the hell [they’ll do that],” Margarita Simonyan, editor of state foreign news network RT, wrote on social media.
On Monday the defence ministry said Mr Putin had ordered it to hold drills rehearsing the use of tactical nuclear weapons in response to “provocative statements” from western leaders such as French president Emmanuel Macron, who has floated the idea of sending western troops to fight in Ukraine.
Deputy foreign minister Sergei Ryabkov said on Thursday that the drills were a warning to the West not to escalate tensions with Russia further. “We are warning our adversaries that their escalationary tendencies make it necessary for us to take steps to essentially strengthen our deterrence,” Mr Ryabkov said, according to Interfax.
Mr Ryabkov also hinted that Moscow could change its nuclear doctrine, which allows for a nuclear strike only in response to an enemy nuclear attack or if Russia’s very existence as a state is threatened. “At the moment there are no such changes, but the situation itself is changing,” Mr Ryabkov said. “So the relation of our basic documents in the field to our security requirements is the subject of constant analysis.”
Mr Putin, however, played down the significance of the drills, the first tactical nuclear exercises Russia has ever announced in advance. “There is nothing unusual here, it’s planned work,” Mr Putin said in comments to the commanders.
– Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2024