Russian President Vladimir Putin announced a partial military mobilization and vowed to defend the right of the Donbass, Kherson and Zaporozhye regions to hold referenda on joining Russia.
“Russia is under an attack by the West, which wants the country to be broken up into warring pieces, President Vladimir Putin has claimed.
‘The Western goal is to weaken, disunite and ultimately destroy our nation. They are saying directly that they managed to break up the Soviet Union in 1991, and now it is time for Russia itself to be split into many regions that would be at each other’s throats’, the Russian leader stated in a televised address on Wednesday.
Putin’s accusations came as he updated the nation on Russia’s military campaign in Ukraine and explained his decision to mobilize army reserves. He insisted that the hostile Ukrainian government in Kiev was a product of Western-induced Russophobia.
‘For decades [the West] has intentionally fostered hatred towards Russia, first and foremost in Ukraine, which they envisioned as a foothold against Russia. The West turned the Ukrainian people into cannon fodder and pushed them to a war against our country’, Putin said. He stated that the ongoing conflict started in 2014, when an armed coup in Kiev toppled Ukraine’s elected government.
The US and its allies have stated their goal as being Russia’s defeat on the battlefield, which, according to Putin, would lead to a ‘total negation of [Russia’s] political, economic, cultural and any other kind of sovereignty, a total pillaging of our nation’.
He warned that Russia will use any means at its disposal to defend itself and ensure its territorial integrity, up to and including the deployment of its nuclear arsenal, if attacked with weapons of mass destruction”. -RT
By formally incorporating the Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia provinces into Russian territory, Russia will transform what was, in terms of international law, nothing more than a civil war between Ukrainians and secessionists into an international war between Russia and Ukraine.
This will give Vladimir Putin the opportunity to ask the Duma to formally declare war, not only against Ukraine but against the various countries providing military assistance to Ukraine through the mechanism of NATO.
Because it won’t matter whether the enemies of Russia recognize the results of these four democratic referendums, this preemptive refusal to accept the will of the Novorussian people doesn’t come as a surprise.
Ironically, the self-professed “democracies” are the ones opposing yet another free and democratic act of self-determination, as they previously have in Catalonia, France, and Ireland.
From the beginning, the Russian Special Military Operation was much more concerned with defending the sovereignty of the nations living under the misrule of the NATO regimes than it was with the conquest of Eastern Ukraine.
The Kremlin has repeatedly demonstrated that it is less interested in regime change in Kiev than it is in Berlin, Paris, Rome, Warsaw, and Bern. They know perfectly well that the people of Europe are no more enthusiastic about “standing with Ukraine” than they are about “welcoming refugees”.
The upcoming winter will seemingly determine the future strategy of NATO and the United States, as Europe famines for fossil fuels.
The Europeans are going to have to surrender to Russia sooner or later, so they might as well do it sooner and minimize the monetary consequences to their people and their economies.