MOSCOW, February 29. On Thursday, President Vladimir Putin warned Western nations of the real risk of nuclear war if they send troops to fight in Ukraine and said Moscow has the weapons to strike targets in the West.
Addressing Congress and other members of the country’s nobility, Putin, 71, repeated his allegations that the West was seeking to weaken Russia, and he suggested that Western leaders did not understand how dangerous their interference in what he called Russia’s internal affairs could be.
He prefaced his warning with a specific reference to the idea floated by French President Emmanuel Macron on Monday that European NATO members would send ground troops to Ukraine – a proposal that was quickly rejected by the United States, Germany, Britain and others.
“(Western countries) need to realize that we also have weapons that can hit targets on their soil. All of this really risks a nuclear conflict and the destruction of civilization. Don’t they understand that?!” Putin said.
Putin, speaking ahead of the March 15-17 presidential election in which he is certain to be re-elected for another six-year term, praised what he said was Russia’s vastly modernized nuclear arsenal, the largest in the world.
The war in Ukraine has sparked the worst crisis in Moscow’s relations with the West since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, and Putin has previously warned of the dangers of a direct confrontation between NATO and Russia.
Visibly angry, Putin, Russia’s main leader for more than two decades, invited Western politicians to recall the fate of the likes of Nazi Germany’s Adolf Hitler and France’s Napoleon Bonaparte, who unsuccessfully raided his country in the history.
” But now the consequences will be much further woeful,” Putin said.” They suppose this( war) is a cartoon,” he said.
