Russia would consider NATO forces protecting Ukrainian airspace as a declaration of war, former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev said on Monday.
“Implementing the provocative idea of Kiev and other idiots to create a no-fly zone over ‘Ukraine’ and allowing NATO countries to down our drones will mean only one thing: NATO’s war with Russia,” the politician wrote on his Telegram channel.
After a slew of Russian drones violated Polish airspace last week, NATO deployed additional fighter jets along its eastern flank. That prompted fresh discussion in Europe about extending protection to western Ukraine and shooting down incoming Russian drones or missiles there.
Since the start of the large-scale invasion in 2022, Ukraine has been calling for a NATO-enforced no-fly zone. But Kiev’s Western allies have so far refrained from such a step, fearing a direct military confrontation with Moscow.
Medvedev, who now wields significant power in Russia as deputy chairman of Russia’s Security Council, also threatened retaliation if Russia’s state assets frozen in the European Union were paid out to Ukraine as a part of a reparations loan.
Moscow, he wrote, would pursue the responsible EU states and politicians “in all possible international and national courts — and in some cases, outside of them.”
Former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev has accused neighbouring Finland of pursuing a course of war against Russia – and has renewed claims for reparations for World War II.
“After joining NATO, Helsinki is pursuing a course of confrontation in preparation for war with Russia under the pretext of defence measures and is apparently preparing a bridgehead for an attack on us,” Medvedev, who is still influential as deputy head of the National Security Council, wrote in a column for the state news agency TASS.
Medvedev complained that staff structures for army units were being created in Lapland “in the immediate vicinity of the Russian border.”
It was clear who these structures were directed against, as NATO had declared Russia an enemy, he wrote. The column itself is entitled: “Finland’s new doctrine: Stupidity, lies, ingratitude.”
The Finns’ security endeavours following the Russian invasion of Ukraine are perceived as ungrateful in Moscow. Finland, which was neutral for decades after World War II, joined NATO together with Sweden as a reaction to the start of the Ukraine war.
Medvedev now sees this as an opportunity to renew old demands for reparations, claiming that the new Finnish policy tramples on old agreements.
Moscow is therefore no longer bound by the peace treaty of 1947, which limited Soviet reparation claims to $300 million: Medvedev argued the damage actually caused by Finland during World War II amounted to 20 trillion roubles ($244 billion), he claimed.
Finland took part in the war against the Soviet Union alongside Hitler’s Germany in 1941. The Finns saw this as a continuation of the Winter War launched by the Soviet Union in 1939, in which Moscow annexed large areas of Finland.
To this day, the 1939 Winter War following the Hitler-Stalin Pact is just as rarely discussed in Russian historiography as the annexation of the Baltic States carried out by Moscow at the time.
In this context, Medvedev wrote that Finland was just as responsible for World War II as Germany.
Here’s a look at the 2008 military conflict between Russia and Georgia.
The conflict centered on South Ossetia and Abkhazia, two “breakaway provinces” in Georgia. They are officially part of Georgia, but have separate governments unrecognized by most countries.
Abkhazia and South Ossetia are supported by Russia.
During the five-day conflict, 170 servicemen, 14 policemen, and 228 civilians from Georgia were killed and 1,747 wounded. Sixty-seven Russian servicemen were killed and 283 were wounded, and 365 South Ossetian servicemen and civilians (combined) were killed, according to an official EU fact-finding report about the conflict.
1918-1921- Georgia is briefly an independent state after separating from the Russian Empire.
1921 – After the Red Army invasion, Georgia and Abkhazia are declared Soviet Socialist republics.
1922 – The South Ossetia Autonomous Oblast is created within Georgia.
1931 – Abkhazia’s status is reduced to an autonomous republic within Georgia.
1990 – South Ossetia declares its independence from Georgia.
April 9, 1991 – Georgia declares independence.
1991-1992 – Civil war breaks out in Georgia. Zviad Gamsakhurdia is deposed as president.
1992 – Abkhazia declares its independence from Georgia, leading to armed conflict.
October 1992 – Eduard Shevardnadze is elected to lead Georgia. He is reelected in 1995 and 2000.
September 1993 – Abkhazian separatist forces defeat the Georgian military.
October 1993 – Georgia joins the Commonwealth of Independent States.
May 1994 – A ceasefire is agreed upon and signed between the Georgian government and Abkhaz separatists. Russian peacekeeping forces are deployed to the area.
October 2001 – Fighting resumes between Abkhaz troops and Georgian paramilitaries. Russia states that it believes Georgia is harboring Chechen rebels, a claim denied by Georgia.
May 26, 2008 – A UN investigation concludes that the drone shot down on April 21 was struck by a missile from a Russian fighter jet.
May 30-31, 2008 – Russia sends several hundred unarmed troops to Abkhazia, saying they are needed for railway repairs. Georgia accuses Russia of planning a military intervention.
August 7-8, 2008 – Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili sends troops into South Ossetia. Russia responds by moving its troops to the border, flying aircraft over Georgia, and beginning air strikes in South Ossetia.
August 8, 2008 – The United States, United Kingdom and NATO call for a cease fire of military hostilities by both Russia and Georgia.
August 9, 2008 – A delegation of EU and US diplomats head to Georgia to resolve escalating tensions.
August 10, 2008 – Russia moves tanks and soldiers through South Ossetia and into Georgia proper, advancing towards the city of Gori.
August 15, 2008 – Saakashvili signs a cease fire agreement with Russia. The deal is brokered by Sarkozy.
August 16, 2008 – Medvedev signs the cease fire agreement.
August 22, 2008 – Russia partially withdraws its troops from Georgia, as part of the cease fire agreement. Russia maintains soldiers at checkpoints near the disputed territories of Abkhazia and South Ossetia.
August 26, 2008 – Medvedev signs an order recognizing the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. In response, President Bush releases a statement saying, in part, “The United States condemns the decision by the Russian president to recognize as independent states the Georgian regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia…The territorial integrity and borders of Georgia must be respected, just as those of Russia or any other country.”
July 2009 – UN observers leave Georgia after nearly 16 years. The mission was not extended due to a Russian veto.
Russia’s ultimate war goal is to get rid of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, said Dmitry Medvedev, Russia’s former president and prime minister.
Medvedev, now deputy chairman of the Security Council of Russia, made the remarks in an interview with Russia’s state-run news agency RIA Novosti, and also on his Telegram channel, where he regularly issues nuclear threats against Ukraine.
Then Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin (L) and Dmitry Medvedev meet their supporters on December 1, 2011 in Moscow, Russia. Russia’s ultimate goal is to oust Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, said Medvedev. Sasha Mordovets/Getty Images
He has previously called for the elimination of the Ukrainian president, but it is the first time a Russian official has admitted it is a legitimate goal of the Kremlin in its “special military operation”—a term used by Russian President Vladimir Putin for his war in Ukraine.
“What about negotiations in 2024? Everything is quite obvious,” Medvedev said, answering a question about war goals for Russia next year. “The special operation will continue, its goal will remain the disarmament of Ukrainian troops and the renunciation of the current Ukrainian state from the ideology of neo-Nazism.”
Medvedev was repeating the Kremlin line that Putin’s war in Ukraine was launched to “denazify” the country and its leadership. Russia “will strive for the demilitarization and denazification of Ukraine,” Putin said, when launching his full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
“The removal of the ruling Bandera regime is clearly not declared, but the most important and inevitable goal that must and will be achieved,” Medvedev added.
Medvedev’s derogatory phrase to describe Zelensky’s government is a reference to Stepan Bandera, a Ukrainian nationalist who joined forces with the German Nazis during World War II.
Zelensky, who is of Jewish descent, described Russian claims that the Kyiv government is full of neo-Nazis as “laughable” in a CNN interview last year.
Newsweek has contacted the foreign ministries of Ukraine and Russia for comment via email.
Zelensky denied any involvement, saying his country didn’t possess weapons capable of such strikes.
“After today’s terrorist attack, there are no options left aside [from] the physical elimination of Zelensky and his cabal,” said Medvedev on his Telegram channel.
The former Russian president also said Zelensky did not need to sign “an instrument of unconditional surrender.”
“Hitler, as is known, did not sign it either. There will always be some substitute,” Medvedev wrote.
A few months later, in August, Medvedev said on his Telegram channel that Zelensky’s administration “should be wiped off the face of the earth.”
“Even the ashes from him should remain. This dirt should not have a chance to be reborn under any circumstances,” he wrote. “If it takes years and even decades, so be it. We have no other choice: either we will destroy their hostile political regime, or the collective West will eventually tear Russia apart. And in this case, he will die with us.”
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Uncommon Knowledge
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
A former Russian state television pundit who was recently fired from his on-screen role for besmirching two foreign ministry officials has forecast that the Kremlin will fall into turmoil in the coming decade.
In a recent video recording, Yevgeny Satanovsky, president of the Middle East Institute in Moscow, said that “the opportunity of collapse will be somewhere in the 2030s, because [Russian President Vladimir] Putin isn’t permanent; he’s aging.”
“As always, strong leaders are followed by weak ones, and Putin is very strong in terms of holding power—though what I think about how he’s running the country is a separate topic,” he added, according to a translation by Wartranslated. “He’ll put some small, weak s*** in his place. [Former Russian President Dmitry] Medvedev was an example.”
Newsweek approached the Russian government via email for comment on Sunday.
Medvedev served as Russian president between 2008 and 2012 due to the Russian constitution barring Putin from serving a third consecutive term. He swapped places with Medvedev as prime minister, before returning to the presidency. In 2020, Putin changed the constitution so he could remain in power.
Despite waning support at home for the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Putin has largely remained a popular figure among the Russian public—perhaps in part to pervasive propaganda and the Russian president’s deflection of the failings of the war onto his generals.
Throughout his tenure at the head of the Russian government, he has projected the image of a strong leader surrounded by a coterie of loyal officials and oligarchs who risk being disposed of if they speak out against him.
Russian President Vladimir Putin in Perm on October 19, 2023, and Yevgeny Satanovsky (inset), a Russian political scientist and former TV pundit. Satanovsky has predicted a period of turmoil when Putin’s presidency ends. GAVRIIL GRIGOROV/AFP via Getty Images
But this vice-like grip on power from the former KGB agent has led to questions about who could replace him and continue to control such an expansive and an at-times fractious nation, whose relative stability after the fall of the Soviet Union has been marked by Putin’s hold on the Kremlin.
The first chink in Putin’s political armor came earlier this year, when he faced an armed rebellion on the part of the now deceased Wagner Group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin. He had once been a trusted member of the Russian president’s inner circle before growing highly critical of Moscow’s military failings in Ukraine.
As experts noted at the time, Prigozhin’s mutiny—which was halfway to Moscow before it ended—pierced the perception of Putin’s invincibility in the eyes of Russians and many around the world.
There have also been questions asked of Putin’s health since the invasion of Ukraine, including speculation that he was suffering from some form of degenerative disease due to his appearances in public with a puffy face and tremors in his hands and arms—as well as his strict social distancing from others during and after the coronavirus pandemic.
Satanovsky’s prediction comes after he was dismissed as a regular pundit on the state-run Russia-1 channel, where he typically appeared as a talking head alongside Kremlin mouthpiece Vladimir Solovyov.
Satanovsky had accused Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova of being a “heavy-drinking” antisemite and said Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov was a “hopeless drunkard” in an interview.
Fierce firefights and heavy shelling echo once again around the mountains of Nagorno-Karabakh, an isolated region at the very edge of Europe that has seen several major wars since the fall of the Soviet Union.
On Tuesday, the South Caucasus nation of Azerbaijan announced its armed forces launched “local anti-terrorist activities” in Nagorno-Karabakh, which is inside Azerbaijan’s borders but is controlled as a breakaway state by its ethnic Armenian population.
Now, with fighting raging and allegations of an impending “genocide” reaching fever pitch, all eyes are on the decades-old conflict that threatens to draw in some of the world’s leading military powers.
What is happening?
For weeks, Armenia and international observers have warned that Azerbaijan was massing its armed forces along the heavily fortified line of contact in Nagorno-Karabakh, preparing to stage an offensive against local ethnic Armenian troops. Clips shared online showed Azerbaijani vehicles daubed with an upside-down ‘A’-symbol, reminiscent of the ‘Z’ sign painted onto Russian vehicles ahead of the invasion of Ukraine last year.
In the early hours of Tuesday, Karabakh Armenian officials reported a major offensive by Azerbaijan was underway, with air raid sirens sounding in Stepankert, the de facto capital. The region’s estimated 100,000 residents have been told by Azerbaijan to “evacuate” via “humanitarian corridors” leading to Armenia. However, Azerbaijani forces control all of the entry and exit points and many locals fear they will not be allowed to pass safely.
Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev’s top foreign policy advisor, Hikmet Hajiyev, insisted to POLITICO the “goal is to neutralize military infrastructure” and denied civilians were being targeted. However, unverified photographs posted online appear to show damaged apartment buildings, and the Karabakh Armenian human rights ombudsman, Gegham Stepanyan, reported several children have been injured in the attacks.
Concern is growing over the fate of the civilians effectively trapped in the crossfire, as well as the risk of yet another full-blown war in the former Soviet Union.
How did we get here?
During the Soviet era, Nagorno-Karabakh was an autonomous region inside the Azerbaijani Soviet Socialist Republic, home to both ethnic Armenians and Azerbaijanis, but the absence of internal borders made its status largely unimportant. That all changed when Moscow lost control of its peripheral republics, and Nagorno-Karabakh was formally left inside Azerbaijan’s internationally recognized territory.
Amid the collapse of the USSR from 1988 to 1994, Armenian and Azerbaijani forces fought a grueling series of battles over the region, with the Armenians taking control of swathes of land and forcing the mass exodus of hundreds of thousands of ethnic Azerbaijanis, razing several cities to the ground. Since then, citing a 1991 referendum — boycotted by Azerbaijanis — the Karabakh-Armenians have unilaterally declared independence and maintained a de facto independent state.
For nearly three decades that situation remained stable, with the two sides locked in a stalemate that was maintained by a line of bunkers, landmines and anti-tank defenses, frequently given as an example of one of the world’s few “frozen conflicts.”
However, that all changed in 2020, when Azerbaijan launched a 44-day war to regain territory, conquering hundreds of square kilometers around all sides of Nagorno-Karabakh. That left the ethnic Armenian exclave connected to Armenia proper by a single road, the Lachin Corridor — supposedly under the protection of Russian peacekeepers as part of a Moscow-brokered ceasefire agreement.
What is the blockade?
With Russia’s ability to maintain the status quo rapidly dwindling in the face of its increasingly catastrophic war in Ukraine, Azerbaijan has moved to take control of all access to the region. In December, as part of a dispute supposedly over illegal gold mining, self-declared “eco-activists” — operating with the support of the country’s authoritarian government — staged a sit-in on the road, stopping civilian traffic and forcing the local population to rely on Russian peacekeepers and the Red Cross for supplies.
That situation has worsened in the past two months, with an Azerbaijani checkpoint newly erected on the Lachin Corridor refusing to allow the passage of any humanitarian aid, save for the occasional one-off delivery. In August, amid warnings of empty shelves, malnourishment and a worsening humanitarian crisis, Luis Moreno Ocampo, the former chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, published a report calling the situation “an ongoing genocide.”
Azerbaijan denies it is blockading Nagorno-Karabakh, with Hajiyev telling POLITICO the country was prepared to reopen the Lachin Corridor if the Karabakh-Armenians accepted transport routes from inside Azerbaijani-held territory. Aliyev has repeatedly called on Armenian forces in Nagorno-Karabakh to stand down, local politicians to resign and those living there to accept being ruled as part of Azerbaijan.
Why have things escalated now?
Over the past few months, the U.S., EU and Russia have urged Azerbaijan to keep faith during diplomatic talks designed to end the conflict once and for all, rather than seeking a military solution to assert control over the entire region.
As part of the talks in Washington, Brussels and Moscow, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan made a series of unprecedented concessions, going as far as recognizing Nagorno-Karabakh as Azerbaijani territory. However, his government maintains it cannot sign a peace deal that does not include internationally guaranteed rights and securities for the Karabakh-Armenians.
The situation has worsened in the past two months, with an Azerbaijani checkpoint newly erected on the Lachin Corridor refusing to allow the passage of any humanitarian aid | Tofik babayev/AFP via Getty Images
Aliyev has rejected any such arrangement outright, insisting there should be no foreign presence on Azerbaijan’s sovereign territory. He insists that as citizens of Azerbaijan, those living there will have the same rights as any other citizen — but has continued fierce anti-Armenian rhetoric including describing the separatists as “dogs,” while the government issued a postage stamp following the 2020 war featuring a worker in a hazmat suit “decontaminating” Nagorno-Karabakh.
Unwilling to accept the compromise, Azerbaijan has accused Armenia of stalling the peace process. According to former Azerbaijani Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov, a military escalation is needed to force an agreement. “It can be a short-term clash, or it can be a war,” he added.
Facing growing domestic pressure amid dwindling supplies, former Karabakh-Armenian President Arayik Harutyunyan stood down and called elections, lambasted as a provocation by Azerbaijan and condemned by the EU, Ukraine and others.
Azerbaijan also alleged Armenian saboteurs were behind landmine blasts it says killed six military personnel in the region, while presenting no evidence to support the claim.
What’s Russia doing?
Armenia is formally an ally of Russia, and a member of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) military bloc. However, Russian peacekeepers deployed to Nagorno-Karabakh have proven entirely unwilling or unable to keep Azerbaijani advances in check, while Moscow declined to offer Pashinyan the support he demanded after strategic high ground inside Armenia’s borders were captured in an Azerbaijani offensive last September.
Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko previously said Azerbaijan has better relations with the CSTO than Armenia, despite not being a member, and described Aliyev as “our guy.”
Since then, Armenia — the most democratic country in the region — has sought to distance itself from the Kremlin, inviting in an EU civilian observer mission to the border. That strategy has picked up pace in recent days, with Pashinyan telling POLITICO in an interview that the country can no longer rely on Russia for its security. Instead, the South Caucasus nation has dispatched humanitarian aid to Ukraine and Pashinyan’s wife visited Kyiv to show her support, while hosting U.S. troops for exercises.
Moscow, which has a close economic and political relationship with Azerbaijan, reacted furiously, summoning the Armenian ambassador.
In a message posted on Telegram on Tuesday, Dmitry Medvedev, former president of Russia and secretary of its security council, said Pashinyan “decided to blame Russia for his botched defeat. He gave up part of his country’s territory. He decided to flirt with NATO, and his wife took biscuits to our enemies. Guess what fate awaits him…”
Who supports whom?
The South Caucasus is a tangled web of shifting alliances.
Russia aside, Armenia has built close relations with neighboring Iran, which has vowed to protect it, as well as India and France. French President Emmanuel Macron has previously joined negotiations in support of Pashinyan and the country is home to a large and historic Armenian diaspora.
Azerbaijan, meanwhile, operates on a “one nation, two states” basis with Turkey, with which it has deep cultural, linguistic and historical ties. It also receives large shipments of weaponry and military hardware from Israel, while providing the Middle Eastern nation with gas.
The EU has turned to Azerbaijan to help replace Russia as a provider of energy. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen made an official visit to the capital, Baku, last summer in a bid to secure increased exports of natural gas, describing the country as a “reliable, trustworthy partner.”
Elon Musk secretly ordered his engineers to disable Starlink satellite communications near the coast of Russian-occupied Crimea last year to sabotage a planned Ukrainian drone strike.
Musk was worried the drone submarine attack, which was targeting the Russian naval fleet in Sevastopol, would escalate tensions and potentially lead to a nuclear war, according to an extract from historian Walter Isaacson’s upcoming biography “Elon Musk.”
Musk on Thursday evening painted a slightly different picture to the one described by Isaacson. He said satellites in those regions were never turned on in the first place and he simply chose not to activate them.
The extract, published by the Washington Post on Thursday, shows Musk’s journey from eager supporter to reluctant ally of Ukraine.
Isaacson writes that Musk reportedly panicked when he heard about the planned Ukrainian attack, which was using Starlink satellites to guide six drones packed with explosives towards the Crimea coast.
After speaking to the Russian ambassador to the United States — who reportedly told him an attack on Crimea would trigger a nuclear response — Musk took matters into his own hands and ordered his engineers to turn off Starlink coverage “within 100 kilometers of the Crimean coast.”
This caused the drones to lose connectivity and wash “ashore harmlessly,” effectively sabotaging the offensive mission.
Ukraine’s reaction was immediate: Officials frantically called Musk and asked him to turn the service back on, telling him that the “drone subs were crucial to their fight for freedom.”
But Musk was unwavering. He argued that Ukraine was “going too far and inviting strategic defeat” and that he did not want his satellites used for offensive purposes.
This was the beginning of a well-documented cooling of relationships between Ukrainian forces and the billionaire entrepreneur, who had been helping keep Ukraine online since the beginning of the Kremlin’s full-scale invasion through his Starlink satellites, as Ukrainian infrastructure was severely damaged by Russian attacks.
But as Ukraine moved on the offensive, Musk started restricting the Ukrainian military’s use of Starlink in Russian-controlled regions and for drone control, while also warning he would stop financially supporting of the service. His argument was the same: He wanted to prevent the conflict from escalating into a world war.
“There was an emergency request from government authorities to activate Starlink all the way to Sevastopol,” Musk said on X (formerly Twitter). “The obvious intent being to sink most of the Russian fleet at anchor. If I had agreed to their request, then SpaceX would be explicitly complicit in a major act of war and conflict escalation.”
Russia’s former President Dmitry Medvedev on Thursday praised Musk’s choice to shut down Starlink during Ukraine’s strike attempt.
“If what Isaacson has written in his book is true, then it looks like Musk is the last adequate mind in North America,” Medvedev wrote on Musk’s X. “Or, at the very least, in gender-neutral America, he is the one with the balls.”
“Elon Musk,” a biography by historian, professor and former Time magazine editor Isaacson, is set to be released on September 12.
This story has been updated with comments from Elon Musk.
Moscow launched a barrage of drone attacks early Sunday at a port in Ukraine’s Odesa region used by Kyiv to export grain, a day ahead of talks between Russia and Turkey where reviving a U.N.-backed grain deal will be high on the agenda.
Kyiv’s air defenses shot down 22 out of the 25 Iranian-made drones destined for the Danube River port infrastructure, Ukraine’s air force said on Telegram on Sunday. At least two people were reported injured.
The Danube River has become Ukraine’s main route for shipping grain after a deal brokered by Turkey and the U.N. allowing Kyiv to use the Black Sea for exports collapsed in July. Moscow has stepped up its attacks of Danube port infrastructure in recent weeks.
Russian President Vladimir Putin is set to meet Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Russia on Monday, where Turkey is expected to push for the restoration of the Black Sea grain deal.
“Russian terrorists continue to attack port infrastructure in the hope of provoking a food crisis and famine in the world,” said Andriy Yermak, the Ukrainian president’s chief of staff, on Telegram following the Russian attack.
Ukrainian officials also said Russian shelling had injured four people in the country’s southeastern Dnipropetrovsk region Sunday morning, while one person had died after attacks on Saturday in the country’s northeastern Sumy region. POLITICO couldn’t independently verify the reports.
That also comes after a top Ukrainian general leading the country’s counteroffensive said on Saturday that Kyiv’s troops had breached Russia’s first defensive line near Zaporizhzhia in southeastern Ukraine after weeks of mine clearance.
In a sign that Russia is also increasingly looking at all possible options to shore up its forces, Moscow has been appealing for fresh recruits through advertizing in the Caucasus and Central Asia, the U.K.’s Defense Ministry said on Sunday. Online adverts offering up to €4,756 in initial salaries have been spotted Armenia and Kazakshtan, as well as schemes offering fast-track Russian citizenship for those who sign up.
Around 280,000 people have signed up for military service in Russia so far this year, the country’s former President Dmitry Medvedev said Sunday. Last year, Russia announced a plan of increasing its troops by 30 percent to 1.5 million.
LONDON — British politicians are now a legitimate military target for Moscow, a senior Russian official said, after the U.K.’s Foreign Secretary James Cleverly argued Ukraine has the right to use force within Russian borders.
Speaking in Estonia Tuesday, Cleverly said Ukraine “has a right” to project force “beyond its own borders” as part of its self-defense, following a series of drone strikes that hit Moscow’s wealthiest neighborhoods. The U.K. minister argued that Kyiv striking inside Russia would “undermine” the Kremlin’s ability to continue its war in Ukraine, which has officially denied responsibility for the attack.
Dmitry Medvedev, former Russian president and deputy chair of the Russian Security Council, hit back on Wednesday arguing that the U.K. is “de facto leading an undeclared war against Russia” by supplying Ukraine with military aid and specialists.
“That being the case, any of its public officials (either military, or civil, who facilitate the war) can be considered as a legitimate military target,” he wrote on Twitter.
Medvedev, who regularly makes blunt remarks about the war in Ukraine and has called for the killing of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, warned: “The goofy officials of the U.K., our eternal enemy, should remember that within the framework of the universally accepted international law which regulates modern warfare, including the Hague and Geneva Conventions with their additional protocols, their state can also be qualified as being at war.”
Cleverly’s remarks meanwhile appear to be at odds with the U.S.’ position. White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said at a briefing Tuesday that the U.S. was still gathering information on the reports of drones striking in Moscow.
“We do not support attacks inside of Russia. That’s it. Period,” she said.
Moscow took 12 hours to respond after an explosion lit up the dome of the Kremlin complex last Wednesday.
According to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s spokesperson Dmitry Peskov, the security services needed time to investigate the incident.
But the Kremlin’s spin doctors worked extra hours too, no doubt.
On the eve of Victory Day — which traditionally celebrates the Soviet triumph over Nazi Germany, but which has become emblematic of Russia’s current war against Ukraine — the Kremlin’s line at home is that the country is battling an enemy as powerful as it is evil.
That narrative is meant to account for the absence of success on the battlefront after 14 months of fighting, while offering Russians a sense of security that for them life will continue as usual.
But a series of mysterious incidents — including Wednesday’s early-morning blast — is revealing cracks in Russia’s facade of strength. The cancellation of some of the Victory Day festivities is another sign that appearances are beginning to slip.
The Kremlin eventually described the 2 a.m. incursion of two drones onto the heavily protected Moscow compound as an assassination attempt on President Putin by the “Kyiv regime.” That was in a statement Wednesday afternoon, which also claimed the right to respond “where and when it sees fit.” Putin wasn’t in the complex at the time. A day later, Moscow added the U.S. to its accusation of blame for the blast.
“We know very well that decisions about such actions, such terrorist attacks, are not made in Kyiv, but in Washington,” Peskov said on Thursday.
Both Kyiv and Washington vehemently deny any involvement.
Playing it down
Wednesday’s drone attack was the latest in a number of unexplained incidents on Russian soil in recent months, including a car bomb attack on an ultranationalist writer on Saturday — the third targeting of pro-war figures since the start of the invasion, resulting in two deaths. There also have been a number of crashed drones, the derailing of freight trains, and at least two fires at fuel depots in Crimea.
In allthose cases, the Kremlin downplayed the news or kept its distance.
The Kremlin is one of the best-protected sites in Russia, and it has been widely assumed that piercing its air defenses was next to impossible | Kirill Kudryavtsev/AFP via Getty Images
So the fact that this time, it chose to publish an official statement and pointed the finger at the U.S., its main enemy, suggests the Kremlin wants people to take note. But to what effect?
Predictably, the Kremlin’s main mouthpieces have clamored for revenge. Former Russian president and current head of the Security Council, Dmitry Medvedev, has called for the “physical elimination” of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
“Maybe now things will start for real?” wrote Margarita Simonyan, chief editor of Russian state-controlled broadcaster RT.
But other than the usual jingoistic saber-rattling, Russia’s main evening news programs did not air the scenes of the drone explosion.
And still, more questions than answers remain.
The Kremlin is one of the best-protected sites in Russia, and it has been widely assumed that piercing its air defenses was next to impossible. Moreover, it is well-known that Putin spends most of his time at other locations.
That has fed speculation that the drone attack was in fact a false-flag operation staged by one of Russia’s own security services.
Possible motives could be an internal power struggle — as much as the security services are seen as a monolith, they are in fact infamously divided — or an attempt to dissuade the West from further weapons deliveries to Ukraine, since the arms would supposedly be used in strikes on Russian territory.
Symbolic space
But an attack on the heart of power carries a large symbolic, if not physical, price. It was in the domed Kremlin Senate that Putin staged the historic meeting with his security advisers that preceded the February 2022 launch of his full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Its symbolism is undeniable.
Regardless of who is behind the incursion, it is less likely to produce a rally-around-the flag effect than raise eyebrows over the Kremlin’s own defense system.
As yet, the most important military parade, in Moscow — broadcast live on Russian state television — is still on | Olga Maltseva/AFP via Getty Images
Comparisons are being made to when the 19-year-old German Mathias Rust landed a Cessna plane near the Kremlin during the Cold War. The fact that he managed to fly across the border unchallenged was a stark humiliation for Mikhail Gorbachev. Heads rolled among his defense staff as a result.
The timing of last week’s incident does not help either, coming right before the country puts on its usual display of military prowess for Victory Day on May 9.
Even before Wednesday’s strike, the situation was tense. Avoiding the use of the word “war,” which has been banned, dozens of Russian cities have canceled their military parades in order to not “provoke the adversary.” The Immortal Regiment, a hugely popular procession of people carrying photos of their relatives who fought in World War II, has been called off. Some places have even nixed their fireworks shows.
On the one hand, such changes to an important national holiday could drive home the message that Russians are at war with, as the Kremlin puts it, “terrorists.” But the knife cuts both directions.
“In the current context, the cancellation of the parades will be taken as yet another sign that things are going very badly,” Abbas Gallyamov, a former Kremlin speechwriter turned analyst, told the Echo Moskvy outlet.
While avoiding mass gatherings in cities close to Russia’s border with Ukraine might seem like a logical precaution, that is less obvious for those thousands of kilometers away in Siberia.
Red Square speech
Some wonder aloud whether certain cities might simply lack the military equipment for a parade. Or whether they might wish to stop people taking to the streets holding photos of their relatives who have died in Ukraine, thereby providing a visual of Russia’s wartime death toll.
As yet, the most important military parade, in Moscow — broadcast live on Russian state television — is still on. But the tension in the capital is palpable.
Red Square has been shut to the public for two weeks and streets have been barricaded.
Following Wednesday’s incident, Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin immediately banned the use of drones, and dozens of other regions have since followed suit. Days in advance, Muscovites were already experiencing problems with their GPS signals.
Much will hinge on Putin. His yearly Victory Day speech on Red Square is one of the few moments when his whereabouts are known in advance.
After Wednesday’s security breach, some question whether he might reconsider.
But the optics of his absence would not be good, and chances are slim that the Kremlin would risk the psychological fallout.
And yet, the question of whether it is safe enough for the president to come out in public in central Moscow speaks louder than the sound of 10,000 men marching on Red Square.
Jamie Dettmer is opinion editor at POLITICO Europe.
It appears it’s only a matter of time before the Kremlin orders another draft to replenish its depleted ranks and make up for the battlefield failings of its command.
This week, Norway’s army chief said Russia has already suffered staggering losses, estimating 180,000 Russian soldiers have been killed or wounded in Ukraine since February — a figure much higher than American estimates, as General Mark Milley, chairman of the United States Joint Chiefs of Staff, had suggested in November that the toll was around 100,000.
But whatever the exact tally, few military analysts doubt Russian forces are suffering catastrophic casualties. In a video posted this week, Russian human rights activist Olga Romanova, who heads the Russia Behind Bars charity, said that of the 50,000 conscripts recruited from jails by Yevgeny Prigozhin’s paramilitary mercenary outfit, the Wagner Group, 40,000 are now dead, missing or deserted.
In some ways, the high Wagner toll isn’t surprising, with increasing reports from both sides of the front lines that Prigozhin has been using his recruits with little regard for their longevity. One American volunteer, who asked to remain unnamed, recently told POLITICO that he was amazed how Wagner commanders were just hurling their men at Ukrainian positions, only to have them gunned down for little gain.
Andrey Medvedev, a Wagner defector who recently fled to Norway, has also told reporters that in the months-long Russian offensive against the Ukrainian city of Bakhmut, former prisoners were thrown into battle as cannon fodder, as meat. “In my platoon, only three out of 30 men survived. We were then given more prisoners, and many of those died too,” he said.
Of course, Wagner is at the extreme end when it comes to carelessness with lives — but as Ukraine’s deadly New Year’s Day missile strike demonstrated, regular Russian armed forces are also knee-deep in blood. Russia says 89 soldiers were killed at Makiivka — the highest single battlefield loss Moscow has acknowledged since the invasion began — while Ukraine estimates the death toll was nearer 400.
Many of those killed there came from Samara, a city located at the confluence of the Volga and Samara rivers, where Communist dictator Joseph Stalin had an underground complex built for Russian leaders in case of a possible evacuation from Moscow. The bunker was built in just as much secrecy as the funerals that have been taking place over the past few weeks for the conscripts killed at Makiivka. “Lists [of the dead] will not be published,” Samara’s military commissar announced earlier this month.
To make up for these losses, Russia’s military bloggers, who have grown increasingly critical, have been urging a bigger partial mobilization, this time of 500,000 reservists to add to the 300,000 already called up in September. President Vladimir Putin has denied this, and Kremlin press spokesman Dmitry Peskov has also dismissed the possibility, saying that the “topic is constantly artificially activated both from abroad and from within the country.”
Yet, last month, Russia’s Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu called for Russia’s army to be boosted from its current 1.1 million to 1.5 million, and he announced new commands in regions around Moscow, St. Petersburg and Karelia, on the border with Finland.
Meanwhile, circumstantial evidence that another draft will be called is also accumulating — though whether it will be done openly or by stealth is unclear.
Along these lines, both the Kremlin and Russia’s political-military establishment have been redoubling propaganda efforts, attempting to shape a narrative that this war isn’t one of choice but of necessity, and that it amounts to an existential clash for the country.
General Valery Gerasimov — the former chief of the defense staff and now the overall commander of Russian forces in Ukraine — said that Russia is battling “almost the entire collective West” | Ruslan Braun/Creative commons via Flickr
In a recent interview, General Valery Gerasimov — the former chief of the defense staff and now the overall commander of Russian forces in Ukraine — said that Russia is battling “almost the entire collective West” and that course corrections are needed when it comes to mobilization. He talked about threats arising from Finland and Sweden joining NATO.
Similarly, in his Epiphany address this month, Patriarch Kirill of the Russian Orthodox Church said, “the desire to defeat Russia today has taken very dangerous forms. We pray to the Lord that he will bring the madmen to reason and help them understand that any desire to destroy Russia will mean the end of the world.” And the increasingly unhinged Dmitry Medvedev, now the deputy chairman of Russia’s Security Council, has warned that the war in Ukraine isn’t going as planned, so it might be necessary to use nuclear weapons to avoid failure.
As Russia’s leaders strive to sell their war as an existential crisis, they are mining ever deeper for tropes to heighten nationalist fervor too, citing the Great Patriotic War at every turn. At the Museum of the Defense and Siege of Leningrad, which commemorates the breaking of the German siege of the city in 1944, a new exhibition dedicated to “The Lessons of Fascism Yet to Be Learned” is due to be unveiled, and it is set to feature captured Ukrainian tanks and armored vehicles. “It’s only logical that a museum dedicated to the struggle against Nazism would support the special operation directed against neo-Nazism in Ukraine,” a press release helpfully suggests.
In line with Putin’s insistence that the war is being waged to “de-Nazify” Ukraine, Kremlin propagandists have also been endeavoring to popularize the slogan, “We can do it again.”
At the same time, there are signs that local recruitment centers are gearing up for another surge of draftees as well.
Rumors of a fresh partial mobilization have prompted some dual-citizen Central Asian workers — those holding Russian passports and who would be eligible to be drafted — to leave the country, and some say they’ve been prevented from exiting. A Kyrgyz man told Radio Free Europe he was stopped by Russian border guards when he tried to cross into Kazakhstan en route to Kyrgyzstan. “Russian border guards explained to me quite politely that ‘you are included in a mobilization list, this is the law, and you have no right to go,’” he said.
In order to prevent another surge of refuseniks, Moscow also seems determined to put up further restrictions on crossing Russia’s borders, including possibly making it obligatory for Russians to book a specific time and place in advance, so that they can exit. Amendments to a transport law introduced in the Duma on Monday would require “vehicles belonging to Russian transport companies, foreign transport companies, citizens of the Russian Federation, foreign citizens, stateless persons and other road users” to reserve a date and time “in order to cross the state border of the Russian Federation.”
Transport officials say this would only affect haulers and would help ease congestion near border checkpoints. But if so, then why are “citizens of the Russian Federation” included in the language?
All in all, manpower will be crucial for Russia to mount a spring offensive in the coming months. And Western military analysts suspect that Ukraine and Russia are currently fielding about the same number of combat soldiers on the battlefield. This means General Gerasimov will need many more if he’s to achieve the three-to-one ratio military doctrines suggest are necessary for an attacking force.
KYIV — In Crimea, the war is drawing ever closer, and nerves are on edge.
In conversations via secure communications, people in Crimea describe growing tension across the Black Sea peninsula as they increasingly expect the advent of direct hostilities. They say saboteur and partisan groups are now readying in the territory, which was illegally annexed by Russia in 2014.
Frustration and panic are surging, over everything from conscription to runaway prices. One person told of anger over an inability to secure hospital places thanks to the numbers of Russian wounded brought in from the fronts, while another said that the fretful Russian elite were trying to sell their glitzy holiday homes, but were finding no buyers.
When Vladimir Putin launched his all-out invasion of Ukraine in February, few people expected Ukrainian forces would nine months later be threatening to reclaim Crimea. That no longer feels like a military impossibility, however, after Kyiv’s well-organized troops showed that they could drive out Russian forces in offensive operations around Kharkiv in northeastern Ukraine and Kherson in the south.
Tamila Tasheva, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s permanent representative in Crimea, has high hopes the peninsula will end up back in Ukrainian hands. “Yes, of course, it is entirely possible we will get Crimea back,” she told POLITICO.
“Our goal is the return of all our territory, which of course includes Crimea,” she said in her office in Kyiv. A 37-year-old Crimean Tatar, whose family lives on the peninsula, Tasheva is busy preparing plans for what happens after Crimea is “de-occupied” and is drafting a legal framework to cope with complex issues of transitional justice that will arise. She says while Kyiv would prefer the peninsula to be handed back without a fight, “a military way may be the only solution.”
“The situation is very different now from 2014. We have a lot of communication with people in Crimea and they’re increasingly angered by the high food prices and shortages in drugs and medicines,” she said. “And there’s been an increase in anti-war protests, especially since the start of conscription and partial mobilization.”
When asked about people forming anti-Russian partisan groups, she simply commented: “Of course they are.” The difference between 2014 when Russia annexed Crimea and now comes down to the fact, she argues, that Ukraine has a strong army and a determined leadership and that is affecting and fortifying people’s thinking in Crimea.
Against the occupiers
For Putin, Crimea has long been a sacred cause — he called it an “inseparable part of Russia” — and that led many in the West to fear it could be a strategic red line. That sense was hardly helped by nuclear saber-rattler-in-chief, former President Dmitry Medvedev, who issued ominous warnings about any attack on Crimea. “Judgment Day will come very fast and hard. It will be very difficult to take cover,” Medvedev, now deputy chairman of the Security Council of Russia, said earlier this year in comments reported by the TASS news agency.
Tensions ratcheted up dramatically, however, after the explosion on October 8 that damaged the Kerch Bridge, a vital supply line between Russia and Crimea.
People pose in front of a postage stamp showing an artist’s impression of the Kerch bridge on fire | Ed Ram/Getty Images
People in Crimea say the Russians are jittery and on the hunt for pro-Ukrainian sympathizers, fearing more acts of sabotage. Kyiv has never formally claimed responsibility for what was most likely a truck bombing. The people POLITICO talked with can’t be named for their own safety, but they included businessmen, lawyers and IT workers.
“There was panic afterwards,” said one IT worker. “Since then, officers and soldiers have been moving their families back to Russia. And the rich have been trying to sell their properties worth $500,000 to a million, but the market is dead,” he added.
“Because of the sanctions, a lot of people have lost their jobs and prices for everything, food especially, have skyrocketed and there isn’t much choice available either. If you were making a $1,000 a month before February, now you need to be around $3,000 to be where you were, and how are you going to do that with the tourism industry dead,” he said. Locals are fuming that they can’t receive medical attention because the peninsula’s hospitals are full of Russian soldiers wounded in the fighting in Kherson and Donetsk.
With the situation worsening, more partisan cells are forming, they say. “My group of patriots know each other well: We studied and worked together for years and trust each other — we are preparing, and we understand secrecy will determine the effectiveness of our actions,” said a former banker, who claimed to be leading a seven-man cell.
Inspired by the Kerch Bridge blast, his cell is planning to sabotage military facilities using rudimentary explosives made from ammonium nitrate and diesel fuel.
“There are many provocateurs around and the Russians are anxious, so we’re vigilant. We know other partisan groups, but we don’t actively communicate for security reasons,” he said. “We’ve a deal with a police chief who understands Russia is losing and is worried — he’ll give us key to his arsenal when needed with our promise that we will put in a good word for him later,” he added.
Whether such cells represent any kind of serious threat remains to be seen and POLITICO can’t verify the claims of would-be saboteurs, but retired U.S. General Ben Hodges, a former commanding general of the United States Army Europe, says he had expected partisan cells to form, encouraged by Kyiv and otherwise.
“I would have assumed this. Both locals as well as saboteurs who have been infiltrated into Crimea. Remember the Ukrainians, of course, did this to the German Wehrmacht throughout World War II. There’s a tradition of sabotage and insurgency,” he said.
“I would hate to be a Russian truck driver on a convoy somewhere, anywhere in the area these days. I think when it does come time for decisive action, it will be a combination of local partisans and infiltrated saboteurs,” he added.
‘Crimea is Ukraine’
Ukraine’s recent victories in northeastern and southern Ukraine are fueling confident talk in Kyiv about Crimea, and since Russian forces retreated from Kherson city, 130 kilometers from the northernmost part of the peninsula, the chorus has only been growing louder, as more of the peninsula comes into rocket and missile range of the Ukrainians.
After seizing Crimea, the Kremlin harbored ambitions to turn it into another glittering seaside Sochi — or showcase it as a Black Sea rival to France’s Côte d’Azur. Construction of condos started apace with plans to make Sevastopol a major Russian cultural center. A new opera house, museum and ballet academy were to be completed next year. Around 800,000 Russians may have moved to the peninsula since 2014. The war has ruined construction schedules.
People take part in celebrations marking the eighth anniversary of Russia’s annexation of Crimea in Simferopol on March 18, 2022 | Stringer/AFP via Getty Images
Top Ukrainian officials have been taunting Russia, saying Crimea will soon be under Ukrainian control — by year’s end even or early next year. Zelenskyy has returned repeatedly to the theme: in October telling European and American parliamentary leaders: “We will definitely liberate Crimea.” His top adviser, Andriy Yermak, told POLITICO during the Halifax International Security Forum earlier this month: “I am sure that the campaign to return Crimea will take place.”
Ukrainian officials told POLITICO that Western European leaders had been the most jittery about pushing on to Crimea. America’s top general, Mark Milley, chairman of U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, has cast doubt about Ukraine’s ability to reclaim the peninsula militarily, suggesting it would be overreach. At a Pentagon press conference on November 16, he said: “The probability of a Ukrainian military victory, defined as kicking the Russians out of all of Ukraine to include what they defined, or what they claim as Crimea, the probability of that happening anytime soon, is not high, militarily.”
But the White House hasn’t walked back President Joe Biden’s February 26 remarks when he made Washington’s position clear: “We reaffirm a simple truth: Crimea is Ukraine.”
Raising the pressure
Ukrainian forces have been increasing the tempo of military activity in and near Crimea using both aerial and innovative marine drones to swarm and strike in October and last Tuesday Russian warships stationed at Sevastopol, the home base of the Russian navy in the Black Sea. The Russian-installed governor of Sevastopol, Mikhail Razvozhaev, said in a social media post after Tuesday’s attack that a couple of drones had been intercepted, later adding another three had been downed by Russian warships.
Kyiv has not commented on that attack, but last week, Ukraine’s top security official confirmed Israeli press reports that 10 Iranian military advisers in Crimea were killed by Ukrainian drones. “You shouldn’t be where you shouldn’t be,” said Oleksiy Danilov, secretary of Ukraine’s defense council, in an interview with the Guardian. The Ukrainians say Iranian technicians and operators have been assisting the Russians with the Shahed-136 armed drones supplied by Tehran.
The attacks appear to be unnerving the Russian military — especially those carried out by maritime drones. The October attack involved half a dozen radio-operated marine drones equipped with jet-ski engines. Some of the nearly six-meter-long drones are thought to have damaged two ships, a minesweeper and more importantly the Admiral Makarov, a frigate. On November 18, the Ukrainians repeated the exercise further afield with an attack on warships in the port at Novorossiysk, a Black Sea city in southern Russia.
One Crimea resident told POLITICO that the drone strikes appear to have forced Russian naval commanders to rethink the positioning of their ships. “A group of Russian warships were until recently regularly off the coast near my house. I used to watch them and if they fired missiles, I’d contact my family in various cities in Ukraine to warn them rockets were on their way. But now the warships have moved away, they were too vulnerable where they were.” he said.
The Russians are fortifying their defenses, especially in the Dzhankois’kyi district, the northern part of the Crimean steppe near Syvash Bay, according to Andrii Chernyak of the main intelligence directorate of the ministry of defense of Ukraine.
Hodges, the former general, disagrees with General Milley and says an offensive “is possible and I believe they will be working to be in place to begin this in a deliberate way as early as January.”
“Between now and then, they will continue to isolate Crimea by going after the Kerch Bridge again and also the land bridge that originates in Rostov and runs along the northern coast of the Sea of Azov down through Mariupol and Melitopol and on to the peninsula. The Ukrainians are going to be looking to pound away at the bridge and the land link, a form of eighteenth-century siege tactics,” he added.
Those siege tactics, he says, will be accompanied by daring use of high-tech weapons. “The U.S. navy has put a lot of development effort into unmanned maritime systems and to see what the Ukrainians have been doing with swarm attacks by drones has really impressed me,” he said.
The Ukrainians, he predicts, will attempt “to fight their way across the isthmus when the conditions are right,” adding: “This is going to come down to a test of will and a test of logistics.”
Election commission members count votes of refugees from Russian-held regions of Ukraine for a referendum at a polling station in Simferopol, Crimea, on Sept. 27, 2022.
Stringer | Afp | Getty Images
The results from a series of so-called referendums that have taken place in occupied parts of Ukraine —which predictably show a resounding majority voting to join Russia — set the stage for Moscow to announce their annexation in the coming days.
That, analysts say, could mark a dangerous point in the war for Ukraine with the possibility that Russia could turn to unconventional weapons, even nuclear weapons, to “defend” what it will then say is its territory and citizens.
“As for the risk of Russia using these votes and subsequent annexation of those territories as a pretext for nuclear strikes — we are conscious of this risk, we understand that it is real,” Yuriy Sak, an advisor to Ukraine’s Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov, told CNBC Wednesday.
“Even if Russia’s leader is himself crazy enough to contemplate or even consider conducting a nuclear strike on Ukrainian territory, hopefully not all those people who surround him are that crazy. But again, this is not something we can count on so we, as Ukraine, have to be prepared for the worse and the international community has to be prepared not to budge, not to cave to this nuclear blackmail.”
President Vladimir Putin and other top officials in Moscow have frequently warned that Russia could use nuclear weapons if it feels there is an existential threat to the Russian Federation.
Just on Tuesday Putin ally and former President Dmitry Medvedev wrote on Telegram that Russia had a “right” to use nuclear weapons “if aggression with the use of conventional weapons threatens the very existence of our state.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin (C), accompanied by Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu (L) and Valery Gerasimov, the chief of the Russian General Staff, oversees the ‘Vostok-2022’ military exercises at the Sergeevskyi training ground outside the city of Ussuriysk on the Russian Far East on September 6, 2022.
Mikhail Klimentyev | AFP | Getty Images
Medvedev once again repeated Moscow’s false mantra that Ukraine was being controlled by NATO countries and said “we will do everything to prevent the appearance of nuclear weapons in our hostile neighbors,” adding that “they understand that if the threat to Russia exceeds the established danger limit, we will have to respond.”
The referendums, widely described as a “sham” by the international community, are seen as having created a pretext for Russia to annex the occupied Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions in the south and pro-Russian, separatist “republics” in Luhansk and Donetsk in eastern Ukraine. The regions amount to around 15% of Ukraine’s territory.
A woman attends a referendum at a mobile voting station in Mariupol on September 25, 2022.
In a statement Wednesday, Ukraine’s foreign ministry said “forcing people in these territories to fill out some papers at the barrel of a gun is yet another Russian crime in the course of its aggression against Ukraine” and said the occupied regions remained Ukraine’s sovereign territory.
Calling on the international community to condemn Russia’s latest act of aggression and immediately hit Moscow with more sanctions in a bid to stop the annexation, Ukrainian Foreign Minster Dmytro Kuleba said on Facebook that “you cannot stop the annexation with words of deep concern and personal sanctions — serious steps are needed.”
For Russia’s part, it says it just wants to “protect” Russian citizens and ethnic Russians living in occupied regions — having itself set up a process of “Russification” of occupied or separatist areas with the handing out of Russian passports and promotion of Russian culture and education.
On Tuesday, Russia’s ambassador to the U.N., Vasily Nebenzya, said that Russia would “bring peace” to the Donbass and would invest and develop the region and other territories, as he claimed Russia had done in Crimea (which was also annexed in 2014 after a falsified referendum).
The results of sham referenda in occupied territories in Ukraine.
It’s now expected that Putin, who is expected to address Russia’s Duma, or lower house of parliament, on Friday, could announce then that the occupied regions are being incorporated into the Russian Federation.
Russian news agency Tass reported that the Duma may even debate bills incorporating Russian-occupied parts of Ukraine into Russia as early as Thursday. While another official, Valentina Matviyenko, who chairs the parliament’s upper house, said lawmakers could consider annexation legislation on Oct. 4, Russian news agency RIA Novosti reported.
Federica Reccia, Russia and CIS analyst at the Economist Intelligence Unit, noted Tuesday that “Russia is racing to consolidate its positions in Ukraine and integrate Ukraine’s south-eastern regions as quickly as possible.”
“Annexing these regions would provide Russia with a pretext to redesignate them as ‘de jure’ Russian territories, giving Russia a justification to retaliate with disproportionate force against any attacks on them,” she said in emailed comments.
“Annexing these territories will open up a very dangerous phase in the conflict, potentially increasing the risk of bringing NATO closer to a confrontation with Russia,” she noted.
Putin is no doubt eager to bring the conflict in Ukraine to a conclusion as soon as possible. Looking to overwhelm Ukraine’s effective counter-attacking forces, Putin last week resorted to a military mobilization, calling-up around 300,000 reservists to be sent to the frontline, a move that prompted many eligible fighting men to try to flee the draft.
The U.K.’s Ministry of Defence said Tuesday that Russia’s leaders “almost certainly hope that any accession announcement will be seen as a vindication of the ‘special military operation’ and will consolidate patriotic support for the conflict.”
“This aspiration will likely be undermined by the increasing domestic awareness of Russia’s recent battlefield sets-backs and significant unease about the partial mobilisation announced last week.”
For all the Kremlin’s saber-rattling over nuclear weapons, there are a number of analysts that remain skeptical as to whether, in the end, Putin would actually resort to using them, noting that he has purposefully cultivated an enigmatic persona.
“He has spent 15 years cultivating an image of himself as this unpredictable figure who, like a rat in a corner, might strike out in ways we don’t foresee or ways we see as irrational,” John Herbst, senior director of the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center and former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, told CNBC Wednesday.
“It’s a classic KGB [the main security agency for the Soviet Union for whom Putin worked before entering politics in the late 1990s] ploy” he said. “Putin is a master psychologist.”
Herbst said that Putin was losing friends and alienating his remaining allies, such as Chinese President Xi Jinping and Indian President Narendra Modi, as the war dragged on and that his military mobilization had left him isolated and criticized on a domestic level.
As such, rhetoric around the use of nuclear weapons had its use for an increasingly desperate Putin looking to strike fear into the West.
“He is trying to make the notion that he might use nuclear weapons as his [way] out of this crisis. He wants to make sure the U.S. and NATO don’t send more weapons to Ukraine so the Ukrainian counteroffensive doesn’t continue,” Herbst noted.
“We cannot rule out something irrational on Putin’s part but it would be extremely dangerous for him and for Russia.”
Ukrainian official Yuriy Sak said Kyiv hoped that Russian fear of a reprisal from the West would stop it from going too far.
“Russia has been using nuclear blackmail since day one of this aggression, their propaganda machine is talking about this on a daily basis. At the same time, we have heard the leaders of the free world, the G-7 and U.S. say that, should this God forbid happen, Russia will face very severe consequences and we hope that this will serve as a deterrent,” he said.
