Guy Faulconbridge and Vladimir Soldatkin – Reuters May 9, 2024
- Putin says West risking an international conflict
- ‘We will not allow anyone to threaten us’
- Russia’s strategic forces are combat ready
MOSCOW, May 9 (Reuters) – Russian President Vladimir Putin accused the West on Thursday of risking a global conflict and said no one would be allowed to threaten the world’s biggest nuclear power as Russia marked the Soviet Union’s victory over Nazi Germany in World War Two.
As Russian troops advance against Ukraine’s Western-backed forces, Putin accused “arrogant” Western elites of forgetting the decisive role played by the Soviet Union in defeating Nazi Germany, and of stoking conflicts across the world.
“We know what the exorbitance of such ambitions leads to. Russia will do everything to prevent a global clash,” Putin said on Red Square after Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu reviewed troops lined up in a rare May blizzard.
“But at the same time, we will not allow anyone to threaten us. Our strategic forces are always in a state of combat readiness.”
Putin, who sent his army into Ukraine in 2022, casts the war as part of a struggle with the West, which he says humiliated Russia after the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 by encroaching on what he considers Moscow’s sphere of influence.
Ukraine and the West say Putin is engaged in an imperial-style land grab. They have vowed to defeat Russia, which currently controls about 18% of Ukraine, including Crimea, and parts of four regions in eastern Ukraine. Russia says the lands, once part of the Russian empire, are now again part of Russia.
WAR?
The Soviet Union lost 27 million people in World War Two, including many millions in Ukraine, but eventually pushed Nazi forces back to Berlin, where Hitler committed suicide and the red Soviet Victory Banner was raised over the Reichstag in 1945.
“In the West, they would like to forget the lessons of the Second World War,” Putin said, adding that Russia honoured all the allies involved in the defeat of Nazi Germany. He mentioned the Chinese people’s fight against Japanese militarism.
“But we remember that the fate of mankind was decided in the grand battles near Moscow and Leningrad, Rzhev, Stalingrad, Kursk and Kharkiv, near Minsk, Smolensk and Kyiv, in heavy, bloody battles from Murmansk to the Caucasus and Crimea.”
Nazi Germany’s unconditional surrender came into force at 11:01 p.m. on May 8, 1945, marked as “Victory in Europe Day” by France, Britain and the United States. In Moscow it was already May 9, which became the Soviet Union’s “Victory Day” in what Russians call the Great Patriotic War of 1941-45.
In a much pared-down parade indicating the strains of war, Russia showed off just one T-34 tank. Fighters flew past streaming the Russian tricolour.
The parade also featured Russia’s Yars intercontinental strategic missile which a TV announcer said has “a guaranteed capability to strike a target on any point of the globe”
There were no leaders from the West.
Present were the leaders of Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Cuba, Laos and Guinea-Bissau.
Russian officials warn that the Ukraine war is entering the most dangerous phase to date – Putin has repeatedly warned of the risk of a much broader war involving the world’s biggest nuclear powers.
The crisis has deepened in recent weeks: U.S. President Joe Biden signed off on $61 billion in aid to Ukraine; Britain said that Ukraine had the right to strike Russia with British weapons; and French President Emmanuel Macron has refused to rule out sending French troops to fight Russian forces.
Russia responded on Monday by announcing it would practise the deployment of tactical nuclear weapons as part of a military exercise after what the Moscow said were threats from France, Britain and the United States.
While I believe there’s been some distance between Putin and other members of his team on how to proceed, and I’ve said many times, that Putin has done too little, and had been weak. I now sense there’s a big coming together, and that it is Putin who’s moved his position.
Of course, it is very complicated, and thus difficult to see how the messy dominoes will fall. It would be easy if they were all lined up, but this isn’t a game.
There are many different interpretations of Russian nuclear doctrine. The easiest is the most basic, that if NATO Nazis attack Russia on its classic Western borders, and Belarus is part of this, then Russia will use tactical nukes on Nazi forces in the first instance.
This all gets merky with nuke capable F16s, the possibility there are nukes in UKraine, but under NATO keys, and the entrance of NATO forces wearing their own boots in UKraine, and FFL forces are just that, they are French, and France is a member of NATO, then we don’t know how the Russians will proceed.
Just an add on, and there’s a slim chance no one will see this, even if it clears moderation. The Sun has popped off 4 quick successive eruptions yesterday and they will likely merge into one as they impact Earth.
There’s are very high chance of big system failures, grids could go down, the Internet might go down, Starlink could die, and yada, yada, but the best analysis says there’s a 10% chance of a ‘Kill Shot’. What does this mean? It means every wire and circuit gets fried, nothing works, it’s all over. It’s a 10% chance, and probably won’t happen. This is expected to start around midday today. My take, this is midday EST, not UK time, and others say it’s going to be Sunday. So if you see this, you’ll have an idea of what’s going on if nothing works any more.
I’m not saying this to egg it up, it’s just part of the natural world doing it’s thing. It’s just that most don’t think about it or just don’t want to know.
Each Solar event wasn’t massive, but four went off in quick order, and they will combine. These were what they call full hallo eruptions so we will get hit. The real worry, is that our magnetic field is getting weaker. So even if the modern world survives, it’s going to give us a very good idea just how weak our M-field is.
Illuminazis and Ashkenazis don’t like to attend the Victory Days of their conquerors ..
This is what Putin and his ilk are celebrating:
https://www.hellstormdocumentary.com/product/hellstorm-dvd/
There is no good side in this conflict. Remember Francis Bacon’s words?
putin should have nuked Zelensky headquarter
from beginning with taktical small nuke . this
intercontiental nukes they now display have
more yield then hiroshimanagasaki combined .
they are good for Washingstein + chejenne
mountain !
@ Carl Jones
You really have to get rid of your ideological naïveté thinking that everything boils down to evil Nazis and your wonderful communists.
Granted that the West is corrupt and greedy as Putin says but so also is Russia and it still is largely totalitarian.
Both the West and Russia are carving up the Ukraine. Soros teams, CIA, MI6 and likely Mossad jackals went into the place in around 2012 to destabilize it and take over its economic, political and military infrastructures which they did. On the other hand, Russia in its arrogance has taken the view since the dissolution of the Soviet Union that the entire Ukraine ought to belong to the Russian “empire”. However, despite the exploitation by the Russian Czars and later by Stalin and subsequent anal communist governments, most of the Ukrainians have wanted their independence and to run their own nation. The rest of the world seems to be blind to that interest just as it really is regarding the exploitation of the Palestinians. The reason for the blindness is that the so-called conflict among the power blocks forces the smaller nations to choose sides giving up their own integrity in the process.
In fact, the major powers of the world – the US-UK-Israeli axis, Russia, China, and the EU – want a multipolar world where they will feed more freely on the choice portions of global assets and territories, and each block is still doing business with each other despite the wars. The major powers are economic and military powers which control the lesser nations of the world, and “power” is the only language they really speak. They are all totally sociopathic in their conduct. All of the wars going on now simply serve their joint and independent interests, and they never miss an opportunity to advance those interests on the basis of any crisis they can manufacture.
@Fahrenheit2030
The same (((people))) that did that to the German people did it to the Russian people in 1917-1956 and were the political commissars who egged the soviet soldiers on to commit the atrocities. (((They))) were the power behind Churchill and Rooseveldt and are still in control now. Just look at what (((they))) get away with in Gaza
Commies still displaying & flying their Bolshevik symbols/flags. Notice the Commies never mention that without ‘lend lease’ from US/UK they would never have defeated Nazi Germany