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 the West wanted to divide up Russia and then control the world’s biggest producer of raw materials.

“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.

Says Nato taking part in conflict by sending heavy arms to Kyiv

Nato taking part in Ukraine war 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. “They are sending tens of billions of dollars in weapons to Ukraine. This really is participation,” Putin said.

“This means that they are taking part, albeit indirectly, in the crimes being carried out by the Kyiv regime,” Putin said.

Multipolar world

In the interview, Putin also reiterated his calls for a multipolar world and said he had no doubt that this would happen.

“What are we against? Against the fact that this new world that is taking shape is being built only in the interests of just one country, the United States. Now that their attempts to re-configure the world in their own likeness after the fall of the Soviet Union have led to this situation, we are obliged to react.”

Putin’s existential framing of the war allows the 70-year-old Kremlin chief to gird the Russian people for a much more deeper conflict while it also allows him much greater freedom in the types of weapons he could one day use.

Russia’s official nuclear doctrine allows for the use of nuclear weapons if they — or other types of weapons of mass destruction — are used against it, or if conventional weapons are used, which endanger “the very existence of the state”.

On Tuesday, he suspended a landmark nuclear arms control treaty, announcing new strategic systems had been put on combat duty and warning that Moscow could resume nuclear tests.

French, British N-arms

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.

Published in Dawn, February 27th, 2023