It is impossible to defeat Russia on the battlefield, claims Putin

Moscow/Warsaw/Washington: A day after American President Joe Biden’s surprise visit to Kyiv, Russian President Vladimir Putin declared that it was impossible to defeat Russia on the battlefield. He further claimed that “in fact, the anti-Russia project is part of the revanchist policy towards our country to create flashpoints of instability and conflicts next to our borders”.

In a significant move, Putin announced the suspension of cooperation with New START (Measures for the Further Reduction and Limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms), which Washington termed as ‘deeply unfortunate and irresponsible”.

“They want to inflict a strategic defeat on us and claim our nuclear facilities,” Russian President Vladimir Putin said in his state-of-the-nation address today and declared that “In this regard, I am forced to state that Russia is suspending its participation in the strategic offensive arms treaty.”

The bilateral treaty which was signed in 2010 and became effective in 2011, every year, allowed each side to conduct up to 18 inspections of strategic nuclear weapons sites to ensure the other did not exceed the treaty’s limits of deploying no more than 1,550 strategic nuclear warheads and no more than 700 long-range missiles and bombers. The treaty was to expire in 2026. Russia has already suspended mutual inspections of nuclear weapons sites and participation in a bilateral consultative commission.

Responding to Putin’s decision on the last remaining nuclear arms control treaty between the two countries, the United States Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken said, “I think it matters that we continue to act responsibly in this area.  It’s also something the rest of the world expects of us”. He said the US was ready to talk about strategic arms limitations at any time with Russia “irrespective of anything else going on in the world or in our relationship”.

Putin was seemingly rattled by the unannounced visit of Joe Biden to Ukraine yesterday and thereafter holding talks with Poland’s President Andrzej Duda in Warsaw today to thank him for Poland’s support to Ukraine.

Today while addressing the Federal Assembly in Gostiny Dvor, Moscow, he accused the West of every time resorting to an “appalling” method of deception. “They behaved just as shamelessly and duplicitously when destroying Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya, and Syria. They will never be able to wash off this shame. The concepts of honour, trust, and decency are not for them,” he said.

Putin claimed that the West was using Ukraine as a battering ram against Russia and as a testing range. “I am not going to discuss in detail the West’s attempts to turn the war around, or their plans to ramp up military supplies since everyone is well aware of that. However, there is one circumstance that everyone should be clear about: the longer the range of the Western systems that will be supplied to Ukraine, the further we will have to move the threat away from our borders. This is obvious,” he said.

The recent Munich Conference, he claimed, turned into an endless stream of accusations against Russia. One gets the impression that this was done so that everyone would forget what the so-called West has been doing over the past decades. They were the ones who let the genie out of the bottle, plunging entire regions into chaos.

Citing US experts, he claimed almost 900,000 people were killed during wars unleashed by the United States after 2001, and over 38 million became refugees. “Please note, we did not invent these statistics; it is the Americans who are providing them. They are now simply trying to erase all this from the memory of humankind, and they are pretending that all this never happened. However, no one in the world has forgotten this or will ever forget it,” he said.

Referring to the West’s goal of “Russia’s strategic defeat”, he said this meant “they plan to finish us once and for all. In other words, they plan to grow a local conflict into a global confrontation. This is how we understand it and we will respond accordingly because this represents an existential threat to our country”.

Claiming that it is impossible to defeat Russia on the battlefield, and that is why the West is conducting increasingly aggressive information attacks against Moscow targeting primarily the younger generation. “They never stop lying and distorting historical facts as they attack our culture, the Russian Orthodox Church and other traditional religious organizations in our country.”

He attacked the US saying the “whole world witnessed how they withdrew from fundamental agreements on weapons, including the treaty on intermediate and shorter-range missiles, unilaterally tearing up the fundamental agreements that maintain world peace. For some reason, they did it. They do not do anything without a reason, as we know”.

Putin stressed that no other country has as many military bases abroad as the United States. “There are hundreds of them – I want to emphasise this – hundreds of bases all over the world; the planet is covered with them, and one look at the map is enough to see this”.

He went on to state that this was a “difficult, watershed period for our country. This is a time of radical, irreversible change in the entire world, of crucial historical events that will determine the future of our country and our people, a time when every one of us bears a colossal responsibility”.

– global bihari bureau