Russia threatens undersea ‘cable communications of our enemies’
Joel Gehrke
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Russia has a “moral” right to destroy the undersea “cable communications of our enemies,” according to one of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s top Kremlin lieutenants.
“We have no, even moral, restrictions left to refrain from destroying the cable communications of our enemies, laid along the ocean floor,” Russian Security Council Deputy Chairman Dmitry Medvedev, a former Russian president under Putin, said Wednesday.
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That remark pointed to another avenue for Russia to escalate against Western interests without a direct military clash, just as other Russian officials threaten to renew the blockade of Ukrainian grain exports to the wider world. And Medvedev used it to punctuate a wider demand for the eradication of Ukraine’s military and the subjugation of the entire country up to the border region between Ukraine and Poland, in defiance of NATO plans to fortify Ukraine against future Russian attacks.
“Yesterday, the Russian president said that it is necessary to create a demilitarized zone (‘cordon sanitaire’) for the security of our country,” Medvedev wrote, according to a Tass translation.
“Given the enemy’s decision to supply [the Ukrainians] with increasingly long-range weapons, such a line should run along the borders of [the city of Lviv] in order for it to play a real defensive role.”
That statement called attention to a related threat from Putin, who implied that the recent attacks by pro-Ukraine forces in Russian territory could justify an eventual renewal of Russian attacks against central and western Ukraine.
“And if this continues, then we will apparently have to consider the issue — and I say this very carefully — in order to create some kind of buffer zone on the territory of Ukraine at such a distance from which it would be impossible to reach our territory,” Putin said. “But this is a separate issue, I am not saying that we will start this work tomorrow.”
The conflict has shifted to eastern and southern Ukraine over the last year since Russian forces abandoned their attempt to seize Kyiv. The warring parties are locked in the early phase of a Ukrainian counteroffensive aimed at “the special military operation zone that passes through Novorossiya and Donbass,” as Putin termed the occupied Ukrainian territory that links sovereign Russia to Crimea, the Ukrainian peninsula that Russia annexed in 2014.
“Ukrainian troops have broken through initial fighting positions along a broad part of the front, but remain some distance from Russia’s main defense line,” the Royal United Services Institute’s Jack Watling wrote in a new overview of the struggle. “The Ukrainians are trying to get the Russians to commit their reserves, moving troops from the third defense line to bolster sectors under pressure. Once these troops are pulled forwards, it will become easier to identify the weak points in the Russian lines, where a breakthrough will not be met by a new screen of repositioned forces.”
Yet the destruction of the Kakhovka Dam in southern Ukraine, which Putin credited with disrupting the Ukrainian counteroffensive in that region, could point to a sense in Moscow that Russian forces lacked the manpower to defend the entire front line.
“It is still early days, and we do not know if this will be a turning point of the war,” NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg told reporters Wednesday. “The progress we see is a testament to the courage and commitment of the Ukrainian forces. It also demonstrates that the support provided by NATO Allies is making a real difference on the battlefield as we speak.”
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Putin, of course, insisted that Russian forces are getting the better of the Ukrainians. “They are approaching a number that can be called catastrophic,” he told the Kremlin audience.
In any case, Stoltenberg emphasized that Western aid to Ukraine will continue. “We will discuss a multiyear package of support, with substantial funding,” he said at the outset of a meeting of NATO defense ministers. “We must ensure that, when this war ends, there are credible arrangements in place for Ukraine’s security so that history does not repeat itself and so that Russia cannot rest, rearm, and relaunch a fresh attack.”