{"id":29102,"date":"2017-12-22T13:30:37","date_gmt":"2017-12-22T18:30:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=29102"},"modified":"2017-12-24T12:08:39","modified_gmt":"2017-12-24T17:08:39","slug":"putin-warns-russia-has-right-to-respond-to-us-military-buildup-hints-at-use-of-nuclear-weap","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=29102","title":{"rendered":"Putin Warns “Russia Has Right To Respond” To US Military Buildup, Hints At Use Of Nuclear Weapons"},"content":{"rendered":"

Putin Warns “Russia Has Right To Respond” To US Military Buildup, Hints At Use Of Nuclear Weap<\/a>ons<\/h3>\n
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Multiple Russian state media outlets are reporting that President Vladimir Putin has stressed that Russia has a right to respond to US military build-up in Europe while furthering its strategic nuclear deterrence capabilities<\/strong> in a speech delivered before\u00a0a Defense Ministry meeting on Friday in the city of Balashikha outside of Moscow.<\/p>\n

At the same meeting Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said that NATO has doubled the number of its military drills since 2012 in the vicinity of Russia’s borders, noting that Russia is carefully monitoring what it considers hostile NATO build-up and intensified surveillance operations along Russian borders. The defense minister further indicated that\u00a0the number of NATO-member country troops stationed near Russian borders\u00a0has tripled<\/strong>, growing from\u00a010 to\u00a040 thousand in\u00a0three years, saying<\/a> “In the Baltic states and Poland, four battalion-tactical groups, an armored brigade of\u00a0the US Army, headquarters of\u00a0NATO multinational divisions in\u00a0Poland and Romania are deployed.”<\/p>\n

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\nRussian solider during the September “Zapad” (West) war games. Image source: Getty<\/em><\/p>\n

Since the crisis in Ukraine (which began in 2014) and Russia’s subsequent annexation of the Crimea, an Obama administration policy of steady build-up and periodic war games has been in place in East European and the Baltic countries, including\u00a0Bulgaria, Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Romania. A little under a year ago a Reuters report<\/a> acknowledged that NATO has been “expanding its presence in the region to levels unprecedented since the Cold War”\u00a0<\/strong>– something which the Pentagon has long touted as defensive in nature.<\/p>\n

And just this week\u00a0news broke<\/a> that after months of indecision over whether or not to move forward with Obama-era legislation which initially paved the way for legalizing US arms sales to Ukraine,\u00a0Trump has approved the first ever US commercial sale of weapons to the Kiev government, <\/strong>which\u00a0Moscow sees as an illegitimate puppet regime supported by the West.<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/section>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Putin Warns “Russia Has Right To Respond” To US Military Buildup, Hints At Use Of Nuclear Weapons Multiple Russian state media outlets are reporting that President Vladimir Putin has stressed that Russia has a right to respond to US military build-up in Europe while furthering its strategic nuclear deterrence capabilities in a speech delivered before\u00a0a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[281,16491,553,2583,694,827,857,4318],"class_list":["post-29102","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geopolitics","tag-europe","tag-military-buildup","tag-nato","tag-nuclear-weapons","tag-russia","tag-united-states","tag-vladimir-putin","tag-zerohedge"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29102","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=29102"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29102\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29126,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29102\/revisions\/29126"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=29102"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=29102"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=29102"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}