MOSCOW (Dispatches) - The Kremlin said on Wednesday that Ukraine’s ongoing ambitions to join the Western NATO military alliance presented a threat to Russia’s security and highlighted the necessity for Russia to conduct what it calls a “special military operation” in Ukraine.
In a conference call with reporters, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the idea of Ukraine joining NATO was “the main threat” to Russia which “emphasizes the relevance and urgent need to ensure our security and our national interests.”
Before Russia sent tens of thousands of troops into Ukraine in February, Moscow was demanding legal guarantees that Ukraine never be admitted to the military alliance.
Moscow Issues Apocalyptic Warning to West over Ukraine
On Tuesday, former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev wrote on his Telegram channel that western “half-wits” from “stupid think tanks” are leading their countries down the road of nuclear armageddon with their hybrid war against Moscow.
Endlessly funneling weapons and support to Ukraine while pretending not to be directly involved in the conflict will not work, added the deputy chair of the Russian Security Council, RT reported.
The “security guarantees” proposal unveiled by Kiev on Tuesday was “really a prologue to the Third World War”, said Medvedev, calling it a “hysterical appeal” to Western countries engaged in a proxy war against Russia.
If the West continues its “unrestrained pumping of the Kiev regime with the most dangerous types of weapons”, Russia’s military campaign will move to the next level, where “visible boundaries and potential predictability of actions by the parties to the conflict” will be erased and the conflict will take on a life of its own, as wars always do, Medvedev argued.
“And then the Western nations will not be able to sit in their clean homes, laughing at how they carefully weaken Russia by proxy. Everything will be on fire around them. Their people will harvest their grief in full. The land will be on fire and the concrete will melt,” Medvedev wrote, before citing a Bible verse from Revelations 9:18.
“Yet still the narrow-minded politicians and their stupid think tanks, thoughtfully twirling a glass of wine in their hands, talk about how they can deal with us without entering into a direct war. Dull idiots with a classical education,” Medvedev wrote.
His comments were prompted by Kiev’s publication of a “security treaty” proposal, developed under the tutelage of former NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen.