Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered this Sunday (27) that the country’s nuclear forces go on combat alert due to criticism made by NATO countries (Western military alliance) of the war he is waging against Ukraine.
“Authorities of leading NATO countries allow aggressive statements against our country, so I order the Minister of Defense and the Chief of Staff [das Forças Armadas] to put the Russian army’s deterrent forces into special combat mode,” the president said, according to state news agency Tass.
It’s unclear what “special combat mode” means, but it’s the first time such an alert has happened. In his speech announcing the war on Thursday (24), Putin said that any foreign interference in the action would lead to “consequences never seen before”.
Since the crisis began four months ago, the US and NATO allies have repeated several times that they would support Ukraine and send weapons, but not troops. The risk of World War III in such a struggle has been posed more than once by President Joe Biden.
Washington and Brussels reacted. US Ambassador to the UN Linda Thomas-Greenfield told CBS that “this means that President Putin continues to escalate this war in a way that is totally unacceptable, and we have to deflect him from these actions in the strongest possible way.” possible”.
The Norwegian secretary general of NATO, Jens Stoltenberg, told CNN that the decision was “dangerous and irresponsible rhetoric” on the part of the Russian.
The previous Saturday, the 19th, Putin invited his Belarusian ally Aleksandr Lukachenko to accompany an exercise in which he tested the combat capability and readiness of his nuclear forces. He commanded the firing of nuclear-capable missiles from planes, submarines and mobile launchers.
The maneuver and threat made on the farm served two purposes. First, try to draw a line so that the West does not get involved in an issue that it considers its own — although its majority demand is precisely to prevent structures such as NATO (Western military alliance) and the European Union from expanding towards its surroundings, encompassing Kiev. .
Second, Putin needs to reinforce to domestic audiences the notion that the war, which in Russian media can only be called by government order a “special military operation”, is a reaction to a perceived threat that the West is the adversary. real of the country.
This has been his keynote, progressively, since he denounced the expansion of NATO in a speech in Munich, in 2007. Two practical peaks were reached: when he went to war against Georgia in 2008 to prevent the entry of the former Soviet republic into the alliance and when it annexed Crimea and fueled civil war in eastern Ukraine for the same reasons in 2014.
Sunday’s announcement follows the same logic — at least that’s what is expected, as said a political analyst who asked not to be named and said he was genuinely frightened by the course of the crisis. As logic dictated that Putin would not actually attack Ukraine, everything seems to be on the table at times.
But a nuclear war is not a conventional battle. Its escalation is seen as almost inevitable, and at the end of the road there is the apocalypse. Now, however, Putin appears to be reacting rhetorically to the West’s political-economic siege against his government.
On Saturday (27), he saw several countries announcing that they will limit their ability to make international transactions and threaten to prevent Russia from accessing its US$ 643 billion in international reserves, kept as a cushion precisely for an increase in the severity of sanctions that the country has been submitted since 2014.
On Sunday, in addition to seeing allies such as Hungary and Turkey criticize Putin, Germany announced it would triple its military spending this year to counter what Prime Minister Olaf Scholz called Russian aggression.
Russia has the largest nuclear arsenal in the world, and from an operational point of view it ties in capabilities with the United States. Both countries came to concentrate 70,000 warheads in 1990, at the end of the Cold War that ended the following year with the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
Every day, per mandate of the New Start treaty, both countries have 1,600 strategic warheads, those for use in all-out war, for large-scale destruction, ready for use on submarines, bombers and ground-launched missiles.
In the exercise on the 19th, Putin made a point of also launching a hypersonic missile, a weapon that is seen as vital in future wars, as it reaches its targets by maneuvering along the way, dodging defenses.
