MOSCOW (Reuters/Xinhua) – President Vladimir Putin cast the confrontation with the West over the Ukraine war as an existential battle for the survival of Russia and the Russian people - and said he was forced to take into account NATO’s nuclear capabilities.
A year since the war with Ukraine, Putin is increasingly presenting the war as a make-or-break moment in Russian history - and saying that he believes the very future of Russia and its people is in peril.
“They have one goal: to disband the former Soviet Union and its fundamental part - the Russian Federation,” Putin told Rossiya 1 state television in an interview recorded on Wednesday but released on Sunday.
Putin said the West wanted to divide up Russia and then control the world’s biggest producer of raw materials, a step, he said, that could well lead to the destruction of many of the peoples of Russia including the ethnic Russian majority.
“I do not even know if such an ethnic group as the Russian people will be able to survive in the form in which it exists today,” Putin said. He said the West’s plans had been put to paper.
Putin said the tens of billions of dollars’ worth of U.S. and European military assistance to Ukraine showed that Russia was now facing off NATO itself - the Cold War nightmare of both Soviet and Western leaders.
Putin also has said the U.S.-led NATO was an indirect accomplice to the crimes committed by Ukraine, as the west keeps supplying the ex-soviet country with lethal armaments.
“In today’s conditions, when all the leading NATO countries have declared their main goal as inflicting a strategic defeat on us, so that our people suffer as they say, how can we ignore their nuclear capabilities in these conditions?” Putin told the state television, according to TASS.
“They are sending tens of billions of dollars in weapons to Ukraine. This really is participation,” Putin was quoted as saying.
“They supply arms worth tens of billions of dollars to Ukraine. This is the participation in a way. Why? Because it is not simply military-technical cooperation, since they do not receive money for it,” Putin noted.
Friday marked a year since Russia launched what it calls “a special military operation” to “denazify” and “demilitarize” Ukraine.
Many countries, including the U.S., Germany, France, and the UK, have been fanning the flames of the conflict by sending Kiev tens of billions of dollars worth of weapons, including rocket systems, drones, armored vehicles, tanks, and communication systems.