Russian President Vladimir Putin threatened “the destruction of civilization” in the event that NATO powers deploy forces into the war in Ukraine.
“There is talk about the possibility of sending NATO military forces to Ukraine, but we must remember the fate of previous armies deployed on our country’s territory,” Putin said Thursday in an annual address to Russia’s legislature. “They must understand that we also have weapons to strike targets in their territory. Every tactic they invent and use to scare the world invokes a real threat of a conflict involving nuclear weapons, which would mean the destruction of civilization.”
Putin has invoked the threat of nuclear weapons throughout the war in Ukraine as a method to discourage the provision of military equipment to Ukrainian forces. Western powers gradually have increased the amount and quality of aid to Ukraine, but President Joe Biden has banned Ukrainian forces from using American weaponry to strike military targets inside Russia, and Western leaders are divided about the prudence of sending long-range missiles to Ukraine to the dismay of NATO allies closer to the war.
“We have taken every opportunity to declare what we are NOT going to do,” Lithuanian Foreign Minister Gabrielus Landsbergis wrote Wednesday on social media. “We have imposed red lines on ourselves and announced them openly, while our adversary operates without any. We are an open book to Putin, he expects that tomorrow will bring neither Taurus nor ATACMS nor even sufficient amounts of ammunition. He wakes up every day knowing there will be no strategic dilemmas that would shift his calculations, either on the battlefield or beyond.”
Landsbergis was referring to Germany’s Taurus missiles and the U.S.-made ATACMS. Biden has authorized the delivery of a small number of ATACMS, but not the longest-range variant available to U.S. forces, and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has vetoed the transfer of the German analog. In parallel, Ukrainian forces have used longer-range British and French missiles to deliver punishing blows to Russia’s forces in Crimea, the strategically vital Ukrainian peninsula that Russia seized in 2014, which forced Moscow to withdraw the bulk of its Black Sea Fleet back across the sea.
“What is being done in the way of target control and accompanying target control on the part of the British and the French can’t be done in Germany,” Scholz said Monday. “German soldiers must at no point and in no place be linked to targets this [Taurus] system reaches.”
That statement has been perceived as implying that British forces are present in Ukraine participating in the war.
“This is a flagrant abuse of intelligence deliberately designed to distract from Germany’s reluctance to arm Ukraine with its own long-range missile system,” senior British lawmaker Tobias Ellwood, a former chairman of the defense committee in the House of Commons, told the Telegraph. “This will no doubt be used by Russia to racket up the escalator ladder.”
Moscow has hastened to blame the United Kingdom for its losses in the Black Sea.
“It has been detected that the British, along with the U.S., acted as spotters, supplying [Ukraine] with coordinates of targets,” Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said Thursday, per state-run TASS. “As for the [Ukrainian] attacks against the Black Sea Fleet, they were literally conducted under the direction of British special services.”
That controversy has unfolded in the wake of French President Emmanuel Macron’s comment that “nothing should be excluded” in terms of possible future measures to aid Ukraine.
“Many of the people who say ‘never, never’ today were the same people who said ‘never, never tanks, never, never planes, never, never long-range missiles, never, never this’ two years ago,” Macron said this week. “I remind you that two years ago, many around this table said: ‘We will offer sleeping bags and helmets.’”
That was an apparent jab at Scholz, whose government drew scorn in the weeks prior to the full-scale invasion for offering to “deliver 5,000 helmets to Ukraine.” German officials subsequently agreed to provide lethal assistance to Ukraine, but Scholz was stung this week into defending his hesitance about the long-range missiles.
“I’m surprised that some people … don’t even think about whether what we’re doing could lead to a participation in the war,” he said.
Yet Scholz’s fears have not proven accurate in the experience of other NATO allies, to judge from Russia’s hesitance to retaliate against British missile transfers to Ukraine. Finland, furthermore, allows Ukrainian forces to use the weapons they provide in Russian territory, and officials in Helsinki want Scholz to green-light the transfer of the Taurus missiles.
“I encourage Germany to seriously consider it,” Finnish Defence Minister Antti Häkkänen told local media Thursday. “The German government does know that they would be of great importance.”
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In the meantime, Putin crowed that Russian forces will continue to seize Ukrainian territory.
“Our units have seized the initiative and will not surrender it,” he said. “They are confidently advancing in several operational theaters and liberating more territories.”