Putin Says Attempts To Tip Nuclear Balance Don’t Scare Russia, Moscow Will Uncover “Schemes”
Russia is once again ratcheting up the rhetoric, this time to a fever pitch. Just a day after Putin’s Security Council posted a remarkably accurate and amusingly concise assessment of US foreign policy aims on its website, a spokesman for the Russian Foreign Ministry as well as President Putin himself are out with strong condemnations of both the NATO presence in Eastern Europe as well as US plans to arm Kiev.
The comments come on the heels of a House vote which showed overwhelming support for the provision of lethal aid to Kiev and just a day after the first batch of American humvees received a warm welcome from President Petro Poroshenko. As a reminder, here’s what both sides had to say about Congress’s willingness to maybe start an all out proxy war in the Baltics:
The prepackaged spin is already ready: “sending weapons to the Kiev government would not mean involvement in a new war for America”, claimed the abovementioned Eliot Engel who sponsored the document. “The people of Ukraine are not looking for American troops,” Engel said. “They are just looking for the weapons.”So the only question is how Russia will responds to this escalation: according to RT,“Washington’s decision to supply Ukraine with ammunition and weapons would “explode the whole situation” in eastern Ukraine and Russia would be forced to respond “appropriately,” Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov said at the end of February.
While it’s not immediately clear what constitutes an “appropriate” response, and while the Russian Foreign Ministry’s Alexander Lukashevich contends that an outright military confrontation between the West and Russia “isn’t something anyone wants,” that’s where the ambiguity and niceties end. Here’s more via Bloomberg:
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