In a long speech on national radio and TV to announce the recognition of Russia’s self-proclaimed breakaway republics of eastern Ukraine, President Vladimir Putin did not spare NATO and its neighbor from criticism.
More than that: it condensed previous arguments to say that Ukraine is not a state, but a part of Russia, igniting even more the alerts of the fear of an invasion – moments later the Kremlin ordered the deployment of troops to support the Russian ethnic separatists.
The speech was greeted with fireworks and the presence of some residents of Donetsk, the capital of one of the regions, who appeared to Russian TV cameras after more than 50 minutes of speech by the Russian leader.
In Rostov-on-Don, the main city near the border of the two regions, there was no commotion. A wedding ran its course at the huge Kazatchki Kureni cuisine restaurant, with no TV accompanying the speech.
Historically, it was one of the toughest speeches since Putin took the premiership on August 9, 1999, not to leave the Kremlin in four presidential incarnations and an interregnum as a bigwig in the government of Dmitri Medvedev (2008-12).
All the contempt for the Ukrainian state that Putin had drawn in an article last year has been vented. “Ukraine has become a puppet colony. The Ukrainians squandered not only everything we gave them during the time of the Soviet Union, but everything they inherited from the Russian Empire. Even the work of Catherine the Great.”
According to him, there is “integration” between Ukraine and NATO, even without Kiev’s formal access to the Western military alliance. Somberly, he said Ukraine “is preparing military action against our country,” capitalizing on President Volodymyr Zelensky’s mistake over the weekend when he touted the idea of ​​seeking to have nuclear weapons to stop Moscow.
NATO, he said, is the real aggressor. The organization is “arming and commanding” Kiev. As there are about 800,000 Russian citizens in Donbass (the east of Ukraine, half of which has been in the hands of separatists since 2014), Putin said it was necessary to recognize independence.
“If Ukraine were to join NATO, it would serve as a direct threat to Russia’s security,” he said. In effect, reconnaissance killed the Minsk Accords, which precariously maintained a ceasefire in the region.
He did not speak, but the corollary of this is the subsequent deployment of military aid and troops to the region, which will put a war on the order of the day. There are already at least 150,000 Russian troops on three fronts around Ukraine, by Western accounts.
Putin made a historical review, repeating the concept he has defended since the 2000s that Russia was “stolen” with the Soviet implosion of 1991.
In the president’s view, millions of Russian citizens were left behind their borders in what he called “the greatest geopolitical disaster of the 20th century”, but now with the ultimatum calling for an end to NATO’s expansion to the east, it is clear that he was speaking too. from the loss of strategic depth—allied or neutral countries and areas separating you from the presumed enemy.
Returning to the 2021 text, Putin stated that “Ukraine has never had its own state traditions”. In summary, although the president has not said so, he suggests that the origin as a country with only Russia and Belarus should be the basis of a reunification – which is already advanced in the military area with the allied dictatorship.
“Modern Ukraine was entirely created by Russia, more precisely by Bolshevik, communist Russia. [O pai fundador soviético Vladimir] Lenin is the author and the architect. And now their grateful descendants have demolished the monuments to Lenin in Ukraine, it’s what they call decommunization. Do you want decommunization? Well, that works for us. But it is unnecessary, as they say, to stop halfway. We are ready to show what real decommunization means for Ukraine,” he said.
A cryptic threat, the phrase may even suggest direct military action against Kiev, which Putin has consistently denied to an incredulous West. The entire script for the day was geared towards lending credibility to the hypothesis: a pretext for an ill-explained skirmish supposedly between Ukrainians and Russians, reconnaissance.
The degree of aggressiveness had modulations. The recognition decree will now undergo a protocol ratification by Parliament, which will give the parties some time to breathe before the next steps are taken.
For all the veiled threats, there was no open declaration of war, which in theory allows the diplomatic window to be kept open until US Secretary of State Antony Blinken meets Chancellor Sergei Lavrov on Thursday (24). That’s if the meeting is going to take place.
The military factor had been raised in the pre-speech meeting of the Russian Security Council. In it, Minister Serguei Choigu (Defense) said there are 59,000 Ukrainian soldiers ready to act against “women and elderly” in the Donbass. Kiev denies such a mobilization.
