MOSCOW: President Vladimir Putin cast the confrontation with the West over the Ukraine war as an existential battle for the survival of Russia and the Russian people and said he was forced to take into account NATO’s nuclear capabilities.
“They have one goal: to disband the former Soviet Union and its fundamental part the Russian Federation,” Putin told Rossiya 1 state television in an interview recorded on Wednesday but released on Sunday.
Putin said Russia would only resume discussion once French and British nuclear weapons were also taken into account. “In today’s conditions, when all the leading NATO countries have declared their main goal as inflicting a strategic defeat on us, so that our people suffer as they say, how can we ignore their nuclear capabilities in these conditions,” Putin said.
The NATO and the West dismiss such narrative, saying their objective is to help Ukraine defend itself against an unprovoked attack.
Putin said the West wanted to divide up Russia and then control the world’s biggest producer of raw materials, a step, he said, that could well lead to the destruction of many of the peoples of Russia including the ethnic Russian majority.
“I do not even know if such an ethnic group as the Russian people will be able to survive in the form in which it exists today,” Putin said. He said the West’s plans had been put to paper, though did not specify where. The United States has denied that it wants to destroy Russia, while President Joe Biden has warned that a conflict between Russia and NATO could trigger World War Three, though he has also said Putin should not remain in power.
Putin said the tens of billions of dollars’ worth of US and European military assistance to Ukraine showed that Russia was now facing off NATO itself – the Cold War nightmare of both Soviet and Western leaders.