Russia is continuing to build its nuclear arsenal as a deterrence method against potential adversaries, according to U.S. intelligence.
In its annual threat assessment released to the public on Monday, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) stated that Moscow still holds "the largest and most diverse nuclear weapons stockpile" and that Russia views its atomic weapons as "necessary for maintaining deterrence and achieving its goals in a potential conflict against the United States and NATO."
The report comes as tensions between the West and Russia continue to rise amid the war in Ukraine, and as concerns swirl over Moscow's potential to use nuclear weapons against Kyiv or its neighboring NATO member states. Russia President Vladimir Putin has warned that Ukraine's allies risk starting a nuclear conflict if they expand their involvement in the Russian-Ukraine war. READ MORE...
France’s suggestion that Ukraine’s allies could potentially send ground troops into Ukraine has caused indignation and outrage in Russia, with officials warning it could provoke a direct conflict between Russia and NATO member states.
Eyebrows were raised Monday when French President Emmanuel Macron suggested that European heads of state and Western officials, who met in Paris on Monday, had talked about the possibility of sending ground troops into Ukraine.
“There is no consensus today to officially, openly, and with endorsement, send troops on the ground. But in terms of dynamics, nothing should be ruled out. We will do everything necessary to ensure that Russia cannot win this war,” Macron said at a news conference Monday evening. READ MORE...
BRUSSELS (AP) — NATO will push ahead with long-planned nuclear exercises next week despite rising tensions over the war in Ukraine and President Vladimir Putin’s insistence that he is not bluffing about using all available means to defend Russian territory, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said Tuesday.
The exercise, dubbed “Steadfast Noon,” is held annually and usually runs for about one week. It involves fighter jets capable of carrying nuclear warheads but does not involve any live bombs. Conventional jets, and surveillance and refueling aircraft also routinely take part.
Fourteen of the 30 NATO member countries will be involved in the exercise, which was planned before Russia invaded Ukraine in February. The main part of the maneuvers would be held more than 1,000 kilometers (625 miles) from Russia, a NATO official said.
“It would send a very wrong signal if we suddenly now cancelled a routine, long-time planned exercise because of the war in Ukraine. That would be absolutely the wrong signal to send,” Stoltenberg told reporters on the eve of a meeting of NATO defense ministers in Brussels. READ MORE...
(CNN)After weeks of failing to divide Europe over his war in Ukraine, Vladimir Putin enjoyed two small diplomatic victories this weekend.
In both Hungary and Serbia, openly pro-Russian parties comfortably won legislative elections, providing Putin with a welcome reminder that despite the international community's firm and largely united response to the invasion, he does have some friends to his west.
The most significant victory came in the form of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and his nationalist Fidesz party winning a landslide. Hungary is a member of both the European Union and NATO, meaning Putin can claim to have a friend with seats at the top table of two of his most-hated institutions.
On Sunday night, during his victory speech, Orban goaded not only the EU but Ukraine.
"We have such a victory it can be seen from the moon, but it's sure that it can be seen from Brussels," he said, adding that Fidesz "will remember this victory until the end of our lives because we had to fight against a huge amount of opponents." Included in that list of opponents were Brussels bureaucrats, international media and, pointedly, Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky.
Zelensky has directly criticized Orban for failing to support Ukraine as enthusiastically as many of his European counterparts have over the past weeks. READ MORE...
Bloomberg NewsChina warned the U.S. against trying to build what it called a Pacific version of NATO, while declaring that security disputes over Taiwan and Ukraine were “not comparable at all.” Foreign Minister Wang Yi told his annual news briefing Monday that the “real goal” of the U.S.’s Indo-Pacific strategy was to form Asia’s answer to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. China has often accused the U.S. of trying to form blocs to suppress its growth, a complaint that’s likely to attract greater attention after President Vladimir Putin cited similar grievances before his invasion of Ukraine. “The perverse actions run counter to the common aspiration of the region for peace, development, cooperation and win-win outcomes,” Wang added. “They are doomed to fail.”Complaints about U.S. efforts to strengthen its alliance network in Asia were among several points of contention raised by Wang in the almost two-hour briefing on the sidelines of the National People’s Congress in Beijing. The senior diplomat repeatedly alluded to the U.S. as the source of problems with countries around the globe and issued some of China’s most pointed warnings yet against calls to expand U.S. ties with Taiwan.“This would not only push Taiwan into a precarious situation, but will also bring unbearable consequences for the U.S. side,” Wang said on the sidelines of the National People’s Congress in Beijing, later adding: “Taiwan will eventually return to the embrace of the motherland.” READ MORE...
Feb 27 (Reuters) - Sweden, Finland and Denmark said they were preparing to close their airspace to Russian planes on Sunday, joining a string of European countries taking this measure after Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
The moves follow similar closures of airspace of Britain, Poland, Bulgaria, Czech Republic and Romania to Russia's aircraft. Baltic countries Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia are also closing their airspace to Russian airliners, while Germany said it was preparing to do so.
Iceland has also decided to shut its airspace to Russian air traffic, Icelandic Foreign Minister Thordis Kolbrun Gylfadottir tweeted on Sunday.
"It is now absolutely necessary to proceed with further touch measures to isolate Russia," Swedish EU Minister Hans Dahlgren told public service radio SR.
A European Union-wide ban for Russian flights could be part of a fresh package of sanctions on Moscow to be discussed later on Sunday by the bloc's foreign ministers, an EU official said separately.
Dahlgren said such a ban would be the most efficient way to pressure Moscow.
Denmark would also support a cross-EU ban to Russian aircraft, Danish Foreign Minister Jeppe Kofod said in a tweet.
Finnish Minister of Transport and Communications Timo Harakka said in a tweet late on Saturday that Finland, which shares a long land border with Russia, was preparing a similar closure.
Russia's likely countermeasure will heavily hurt Finland's state carrier Finnair . READ MORE...
KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — In a dramatic escalation of East-West tensions over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, President Vladimir Putin ordered Russian nuclear forces put on high alert Sunday in response to what he called “aggressive statements” by leading NATO powers.
The order means Putin wants Russia’s nuclear weapons prepared for increased readiness to launch and raises the threat that Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine and the West’s response to it could boil over into nuclear warfare.
Amid the worrying development, the office of Ukraine’s president said a delegation would meet with Russian officials as Moscow’s troops drew closer to Kyiv.
Putin, in giving the nuclear alert directive, cited not only the alleged statements by NATO members but the hard-hitting financial sanctions imposed by the West against Russia, including the Russian leader himself.
Speaking at a meeting with his top officials, Putin told his defense minister and the chief of the military’s General Staff to put the nuclear deterrent forces in a “special regime of combat duty.”
“Western countries aren’t only taking unfriendly actions against our country in the economic sphere, but top officials from leading NATO members made aggressive statements regarding our country,” Putin said in televised comments.
Putin threatened in the days before Russia’s invasion to retaliate harshly against any nations that intervened directly in the conflict in Ukraine, and he specifically raised the specter of his country’s status as a nuclear power.
The U.S. ambassador to the United Nations responded to the news from Moscow while appearing on a Sunday news program.
“President Putin is continuing to escalate this war in a manner that is totally unacceptable,” Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield said. “And we have to continue to condemn his actions in the most strong, strongest possible way.”
The practical meaning of Putin’s order was not immediately clear. Russia and the United States typically have the land- and submarine-based segments of their strategic nuclear forces on alert and prepared for combat at all times, but nuclear-capable bombers and other aircraft are not.
If Putin is arming or otherwise raising the nuclear combat readiness of his bombers, or if he is ordering more ballistic missile submarines to sea, then the United States might feel compelled to respond in kind, according to Hans Kristensen, a nuclear analyst at the Federation of American Scientists. That would mark a worrisome escalation and a potential crisis, he said. READ MORE...
Russian President Vladimir Putin, in a long speech full of heavy sighs and dark grievances, made clear today that he has chosen war. He went to war against Ukraine in 2014; now he has declared war against the international order of the past 30 years.
Putin’s slumped posture and deadened affect led me to suspect that he is not as stable as we would hope. He had the presence not of a confident president, but of a surly adolescent caught in a misadventure, rolling his eyes at the stupid adults who do not understand how cruel the world has been to him. Teenagers, of course, do not have hundreds of thousands of troops and nuclear weapons.
Even discounting Putin’s delivery, the speech was, in many places, simply unhinged. Putin began with a history lesson about how and why Ukraine even exists. For all his Soviet nostalgia, the Russian president is right that his Soviet predecessors intentionally created a demographic nightmare when drawing the internal borders of the U.S.S.R., a subject I’ve explained at length here.
But Putin’s point wasn’t that the former subjects of the Soviet Union needed to iron out their differences. Rather, he was suggesting that none of the new states that emerged from the Soviet collapse—except for Russia—were real countries. “As a result of Bolshevik policy,” Putin intoned, “Soviet Ukraine arose, which even today can with good reason be called ‘Vladimir Ilyich Lenin’s Ukraine’. He is its author and architect.”
It is true that Soviet leaders created the 1991 borders. That is also true of what we now call the Russian Federation. Putin, however, went even further back in history: “Ukraine never had a tradition of genuine statehood.”
By that kind of historical reasoning, few nations in Europe, or anywhere else, are safe. Putin’s foray into history was nothing less than a demand that only Moscow—and only the Kremlin’s supreme leader—has the right to judge what is or is not a sovereign state (as I recently discussed here). Putin’s claims are hardly different from Saddam Hussein’s rewriting of Middle East history when Iraq tried to erase Kuwait from the map. READ MORE...
About the author: Tom Nichols is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and the author of its newsletter Peacefield.
A distinct irony hovers over the standoff over Ukraine. A principal goal of President Vladimir Putin’s threat of invasion is to ensure Ukraine does not join NATO, which would grant Ukraine the protection of the alliance’s mutual-defense pact. But even if Russia had not poised troops on its borders, there was no realistic prospect in the near-to-medium term that the United States and its allies would accept Ukraine into their ranks. In a sense, both sides agree — Ukrainian leaders aside — that the nation does not currently belong in the Western alliance.
Clearly, NATO cannot, in response to Putin’s demands and threats, unconditionally promise to deny Ukraine membership forever. Still, the starting point for diplomacy should be the following: There is no way Ukraine will join NATO In the foreseeable future. The United States and its allies don’t want the security commitments that would involve; some NATO members have always been against it; and for Russia, the idea is threatening enough to become its main argument for invading now.
If we can devise a different way to ensure Ukraine’s security, membership may never be needed — as we should indicate to Moscow now.
Acknowledging that reality does not mean abandoning resolution in opposing Russian sabre rattling. If anything, to strengthen our deterrent, the threat of severe and lasting economic punishment if Russia attacks Ukraine should be intensified. Potential retaliation could include a serious U.S.-European Union-NATO plan to wean the West off Russian oil and gas over the next five years (for example, by expanding U.S. production and using NATO infrastructure funds and other resources to build more liquid natural gas terminals in western Europe.) President Biden has proposed shutting down the Nord Stream 2 pipeline linking Germany and Russia if Russia invades, but dismantling it fully would be an even stronger response.
Nonetheless, if the prospect of Ukraine in NATO is taken off the table — albeit not formally, or forever (not yet at least) — the focus of diplomacy can return to resolving the dispute over the two breakaway regions in Ukraine’s east, which Russia seeks to control.
Fighter jets of the Russian and Belarusian air forces fly in a joint mission during the Union Courage-2022 Russia-Belarus military drills in Belarus, Thursday, Feb. 17, 2022. Russia has deployed troops to its ally Belarus for sweeping joint military drills that run through Sunday, fueling Western concerns that Moscow could use the exercise to attack Ukraine from the north. (AP Photo/Alexander Zemlianichenko Jr)
KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Russia announced massive nuclear drills while Western leaders grasped Friday for ways to avert a new war in Europe amid soaring East-West tensions, after unusually dire U.S. warnings that Moscow could order an invasion of Ukraine any day.
Immediate worries focused on the volatile front lines of eastern Ukraine, where an upsurge of recent shelling tore through the walls of a kindergarten and basic communication was disrupted. Western officials, focused on an estimated 150,000 Russian troops posted around Ukraine’s borders, fear the long-simmering conflict could provide the spark for a broader war.
The drumbeat of warnings that a larger conflict could start at any moment continued Friday after U.S. President Joe Biden warned that Washington saw no signs of a promised Russian withdrawal — but instead saw more troops moving toward the border with Ukraine.
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said the U.S. believes Russia could launch an attack “any time” and also said he still had seen no sign of the promised Russian pullback. He will hold a call Friday with Russia’s Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu.
Even as Russia claimed to be pulling back troops from extensive military exercises that had sparked fears of invasion, the Kremlin sent a reminder to the world that it has one of the world’s biggest nuclear arsenals, by announcing drills of its nuclear forces for the weekend. The muscle-flexing overshadowed Russian offers this week of continued diplomacy to defuse the Ukraine crisis.
NATO allies are also flexing their might, beefing up military forces around eastern Europe, but insist the actions are purely defensive and to show unity in the face of Russian threats.
The U.S. announced the $6 billion sale of 250 tanks to Poland, a NATO member that has been occupied or attacked by Russia over past centuries. Announcing the deal, Austin said Russia’s military buildup had only reinvigorated NATO instead of cowing it, as Moscow had hoped.
Meanwhile, world leaders meeting at the Munich Security Conference warned that Europe’s security balance is under threat. Germany’s Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock said that the situation is “calling into question the basic principles of the European peace order.”
“Even steps, millimeters toward peace are better than a big step toward war,” she said. READ MORE...
Pat Buchanan, When the Union was fighting to preserve itself in the Civil War, the France of Napoleon III moved troops into Mexico, overthrew the regime of Benito Juarez, set up a monarchy and put Austrian Archduke Maximilian von Habsburg on the throne as Emperor of Mexico — one month before Gettysburg.
Preoccupied, the Union did nothing.
At war’s end, in 1865, however, at the urging of Gens. Ulysses S. Grant and William Sherman, the Union sent 40,000 troops to the Mexican border.
Secretary of State William Seward dispatched Gen. John Schofield to Paris with the following instructions: “I want you to get your legs under Napoleon’s mahogany and tell him he must get out of Mexico.”
The U.S. troops on Mexico’s border convinced Napoleon to comply, though Maximilian bravely refused to leave and was captured and put before a firing squad.
The point of the episode for today’s crisis in Ukraine?
A powerful army on a nation’s border can send a message and dictate terms without going in and without going to war.
Whether Russian President Vladimir Putin intends to send his 100,000 troops now on the Crimean, Donbass and Belarusian borders of Ukraine into the country to occupy more territory we do not know.
But the message being sent by the Russian army is clear: Putin wants his own Monroe Doctrine. Putin wants Ukraine outside of NATO, and permanently.
If his demands are unacceptable, Putin is saying with his troops on the border, we reserve the right to send our army into Ukraine to protect our vital national intserests in not having a hostile military alliance on our doorstep.
U.S. officials have been describing a Russian invasion as “imminent,” an attack that could come “any day now.”
Given the Russian preparations and size of its forces, some U.S. officials said last week Kyiv could fall within hours of an attack and there could be 50,000 civilian casualties and 5 million Ukrainian refugees.
Ukrainian leaders are less alarmist, arguing that an invasion is not imminent and there is still room for a negotiated settlement.
Russian officials are contemptuous of U.S. claims that they are about to invade. Last weekend, Russia’s deputy ambassador to the UN tweeted, “Madness and scaremongering continues. … What if we would say that US could seize London in a week and cause 300k civilian deaths?” READ MORE...
Russia
‘s foreign minister claims that NATO wants to pull Ukraine into the alliance, amid escalating tensions over NATO expansion and fears that Russia is preparing to invade Ukraine.
In comments on state television Sunday, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov also challenged NATO’s claim to be a purely defensive structure.Russia’s massing of an estimated 100,000 troops near the border with Ukraine has brought increasingly strong warnings from the West that Moscow intends to invade. Russia in turn demands that NATO promise never to allow Ukraine to join the alliance, and to stop the deployment of NATO weapons near Russian borders and roll back its forces from Eastern Europe.The head of Russia’s Security Council, Nikolai Patrushev, on Sunday rejected Western warnings about a planned invasion.“At this time, they’re saying that Russia threatens Ukraine – that’s completely ridiculous,” he was quoted as saying by state news agency Tass. “We don’t want war and we don’t need it at all.”
Russia-Ukraine standoff: Lukashenko, Kyiv residents speculate about possibility of war'
Russia has long resented NATO’s granting membership to countries that were once part of the Soviet Union or were in its sphere of influence as members of the Warsaw Pact. READ MORE...
