Putin promotes Russian escalation in annual speech

“Russia suspends its participation in the New Start treaty,” announced the Kremlin leader in his state of the nation address. As usual, he blamed the West.

New Start is the last remain­ing nuclear arms control treaty between Russia and America. It limits the nuclear arsenals of the two countries.

The Russian president an­nounced that he had signed a decree on “putting new ground-based strategic complexes on combat standby duty”.

He warned that Russia was ready to resume nuclear weap­ons testing.

“Of course, we will not do it first,” President Putin added. “But if the US conducts tests, we will do it as well.”

New Start had been in trou­ble. Last month, Washington had accused Moscow of violat­ing the agreement by refusing to allow inspection activities on its territory.

Moscow’s suspension of its participation in the treaty raises the stakes.

“This is more about nuclear blackmail, but it is extremely dangerous,” believes Andrei Kolesnikov of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, “because we cannot pre­dict how Putin will behave in the future and what is in his mind.

“In order to avoid nuclear war, it’s better to have a frame­work,” he added.

“By losing this framework, we are witnessing the real threat of a nuclear war.”

We’re also witnessing a Krem­lin leader who expresses no re­morse or regret for his decision to invade Ukraine.

His “special military opera­tion” has not gone at all accord­ing to plan, bringing misery to Ukraine, heavy military casualties for Russia and forcing President Putin to draft hundreds of thou­sands of Russians into the army.

So, was the invasion a huge mistake? A giant miscalculation? You won’t hear Putin admit to one of those. He continues to push the false narrative that the West is to blame for the war.

“I want to repeat,” he said. “They (the West) started the war. And we used force and are using force to stop it.”

“The Western elites do not conceal their goals to bring Russia a strategic defeat. What does it mean? It means to end us, once and for all. —BBC