Russian President Vladimir Putin assured on Tuesday to the applause of his people that nothing will stop his war to the end because he considers Ukraine a “historical territory of Russia”. The president, who capped his first speech to the Federal Assembly since the invasion in 2021 with the phrase “The truth is ours,” also announced the suspension of the last nuclear arms control treaty with the United States, which both countries remain in effect. “Russia will face the challenges it faces step by step, diligently and continuously. (…) You cannot beat Russia on the battlefield,” Putin said.
The President insisted that his goal goes beyond control of the Donbass region (to the east) because “the goal of the West is to take away from Russia the historical territories that are now called Ukraine”. Putin has described the invasion of a sovereign country with these words: “Russia defends its homeland.” And he added: “The more resources the West makes available to Kiev in the long term, the more Russia will be forced to avert the threat itself.”
During his nearly two-hour speech, Putin announced the unilateral suspension of the New Start accord, in a scenario already marked by the nuclear threat surrounding the war in Ukraine. “Russia is not giving up, no. It is temporarily freezing its participation in the pact, said the president, who described the US demand to monitor its nuclear arsenals as “a theater of the absurd”. This is one of the key commitments of the Strategic Arms Reduction and Control Treaty signed by the governments of both countries in 2010, but which Moscow has not allowed since the 2020 pandemic. “We know that some nuclear weapons are close to their expiration date in the US,” added the Russian president, who has called for a return to the deal, which includes the UK and France.
The deal was extended to 2026 last year, although the Kremlin hinted in January that it could abandon it once the extension expires. As early as September 2022, Moscow had asked the Pentagon to clarify its claim that several nuclear weapons platforms, including dozens of B-52 bombers and four ICBM silos, had been repurposed. Together, both powers have 90% of the world’s nuclear weapons.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken called Putin’s announcement “very disappointing and irresponsible”. “But of course we remain ready at any time to discuss strategic arms limitations with Russia,” he told reporters at the US Embassy in Athens. Meanwhile, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg has urged Putin to “reconsider” his decision to unilaterally suspend the New Start Treaty, thereby “dismantling the entire arms control architecture,” reports say Silvia Ayuso from Brussels. “More nuclear weapons and less arms control are making the world a more dangerous place. And that’s why we in NATO have worked so hard to engage Russia on arms control issues, and why NATO allies support the fresh start. For this reason, I urge Russia to reconsider its decision to suspend its participation in New Start,” Soltenberg said in statements with Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmitro Kuleba and EU High Representative for Foreign Policy Josep Borrell.
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In a line deepening the rift with the West, Putin has accused the Atlantic Alliance of involvement in December’s attacks on air bases on Russian territory where several of its nuclear bombers were stationed. “We know that the West is directly involved in the Kiev regime’s attempts to attack our strategic aviation. The drones used for this were equipped and modernized with the help of NATO specialists,” said Putin.
Shortly after the Russian leader’s speech ended, his State Department summoned US Ambassador to the country Lynne Tracy to demand explanations for her support for Ukraine. A day earlier, on the eve of the first anniversary of the blitz on Kiev, US President Joe Biden made a historic trip to the Ukrainian capital to meet with his President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
Two people in front of a giant screen on which Putin’s speech is projected this Tuesday in Sevastopol on the Crimean peninsula. ALEXEY PAVLISHAK (Portal)
Much of Putin’s speech revolved around his actions against Ukraine. For months, since the counterattack on Kiev in September last year, Putin has stopped emphasizing in his speech that “everything is going according to plan”. Earlier in his speech on Tuesday, the Russian president acknowledged that it was “a difficult time” for his country, but justified his decision to attack Ukraine with the war the US unleashed in Iraq in 2003. The world has forgotten this and won’t forget this,” he said.
The Russian leader has repeated his accusations that Ukraine is being ruled by an alleged “Nazi regime”, citing the Edelweiss name for a new Ukrainian brigade as an example. Besides the name of a mountain flower and a former division of the Third Reich, Putin forgot to mention that Edelweiß is also the name of a Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSO) military base in Kyrgyzstan. the Russian-led military alliance.
While Putin views Ukraine as part of the Russian world, he has criticized the NATO membership of countries bordering Russia. “In December 2021, we officially sent draft security guarantees to the US and NATO, but we received a direct rejection on all important points that are fundamental for us,” he said at a hearing in which the Kremlin demanded that they are expelled from NATO Atlantic Alliance all countries east of Germany.
As a pretext for his war, the President has also claimed that the West has called the Minsk agreements and the Normandy format a “bluff” to end the war in Donbass. Putin justifies his version of events with recent comments by former German Chancellor Angela Merkel on the 2014 and 2015 Donbass peace pacts. The German politician involved in the negotiations said weeks ago they “only gained time”, so that Ukraine could prepare for a future war. Faced with Putin’s version, his own negotiator of these pacts, then Russian manager for Ukraine Vladislav Surkov, stressed a week ago that Moscow did not negotiate with the aim of implementing the agreed points.
Putin during his speech on Tuesday before the Federal Assembly in Moscow SPUTNIK (via Portal)
Aside from Ukraine, Putin has also made it clear that all of the countries that became independent after the collapse of the Soviet Union are part of his backyard. The Russian leader has accused the West of “burning down” all post-Soviet states after their collapse in 1991 “to finish off Russia for good,” the president said in his lengthy speech.
Putin has appeared before lawmakers after violating the constitutional mandate in 2022, for which he had to stand once a year before the Federal Assembly, the country’s legislature, made up of the State Duma (lower house) and the Council of the Federation (the Council of Federation), accountable to Upper House). In addition to addressing the war, he also boasted that the Russian economy had not succumbed to sanctions and announced an 18.5% increase in the minimum wage to 19,242 rubles, about 240 euros at current exchange rates.
The two major concerns of Russian citizens are the mobilization of 300,000 reservists ordered by Putin last September and a possible new major offensive that could be unleashed in the coming days to mark the first year of the war and which NATO believes has already begun. Presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov acknowledged Monday that the Russians are seeking a breakthrough in a conflict that has already claimed thousands of lives. “At such a difficult and responsible period of our history, our life,” said the Kremlin representative, “everyone is waiting for the news, hoping to hear your assessment of what is happening (…). Our whole life now revolves around the military special operation.”
The war is expected to be long and to encourage the hundreds of thousands of civilians being brought to the front lines, Putin announced that all troops fighting in Ukraine will be given a 14-day rest permit every six months. On the contrary, the President sent a message to those who fled the country: “We will not settle accounts with those who have stepped aside and left their homes. Leave it on her conscience, let her live with it. The important thing is that the people, the citizens of Russia, saw their moral level.”
Participants applaud during Putin’s speech in Moscow this Tuesday SPUTNIK (via Portal)
The center of Moscow had been closed the day before during Putin’s speech to the Federal Assembly. The President’s intervention takes place in the old Gostiny Dvor market, next to Red Square. The security forces blocked traffic through the city center and set up numerous police checks.
Pedophilia, Degeneration and Condemnation of the LGTBIQ Collective
The Russian president has once again insisted that his country wage war against Western values, which he sees as utterly corrupt. “Look what they’re doing to their own cities. The destruction of the family and of cultural and national identity. Perversion, child abuse, even pedophilia are the norm, the norm of life, and priests are forced to bless marriages between people of the same sex,” Vladimir Putin has attacked in a generalized accusation without any basis.
“God bless you, let them do what they want. And here? Adults have the right to live as they choose. In Russia, nobody interferes in private life and we won’t do it,” the Russian leader said a few months after a law banning any public statement in support of the LGTBIQ collective and vetoing its reality in cultural content came into effect. Likewise, the NGOs defending these groups are the only ones whose addresses appear publicly on the Kremlin’s blacklist of foreign agents.
Putin has claimed that in the scriptures of all world religions “the family is said to be the union of male and female” and laments that the Anglican Church explores the idea of a gender-neutral deity. “What can I say? May God forgive me, they don’t know what they are doing,” Putin added, quoting Jesus on the cross.
In Putin’s previous major speech, delivered last September on the occasion of the annexation of the occupied Ukrainian territories, the Russian leader claimed that European and North American societies had embraced “an inverted religion, absolute Satanism.” “Here in our country, in Russia, instead of mom and dad, do we want to have a number one, number two, number three father?” he said.
“Western elites are going insane and there seems to be no cure, but these are their problems. We have an obligation to protect our children and we will do it: we will protect our children from degradation and degeneration,” the president said Tuesday, who has taken militarization in schools to a new level. Your government introduced a new subject this school year, Conversation about What Matters, whose manuals urge teachers to teach minors that “there is no fear of dying for the motherland.” Likewise, the Ministries of Education and Defense are considering resuming the Soviet classes that taught weapons handling and other preparations for military service.
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