Vladimir Putin has said Russia will use all weapons at his disposal if it considers its Baltic exclave of Kaliningrad to have come under direct attack.
The Russian president insisted that Moscow was “not threatening anyone” and merely responding to statements by Western leaders that it was preparing for war in 2029 or 2030.
Throughout this week, Russia has accused NATO of preparing to blockade its territory, which borders Lithuania and Poland, warning that it would even be prepared to use nuclear weapons if the West tried to cut off Kaliningrad from the rest of Russia.
NATO has sought to calm the situation, stressing that it was a defensive alliance and urging Moscow to stop its “nuclear threats”.
Western allies have faced a surge in so-called hybrid warfare incidents blamed on Russia, particularly in Poland and the Baltics in recent months.
Last week alone, Poland said a Russian helicopter had strayed into its territory adjacent to Kaliningrad, and Lithuania said its population felt “constantly threatened” by Russia, in part because of drones entering the nation’s airspace.
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said on Thursday that his country was preparing for further hybrid attacks, “including serious ones”, after a drone armed with explosives was found in August on the tarmac at Leipzig airport close to Ukrainian cargo planes.
In a wide-ranging speech at the Valdai foreign policy forum, Putin told his audience that he believed that international conflicts were highly likely to continue, but would get better as “Western hegemony” weakened.
Although the Russian leader himself began the full-scale war in Ukraine in February 2022, he again blamed the West for provoking the invasion, arguing that Moscow had simply been forced to defend itself and take up arms.
He also insisted that Russia’s attacks on Ukrainian economic targets were a direct response to Ukraine’s strikes on Russia’s oil refineries and its ships in the Black Sea.
“Now from every direction we’re receiving calls ‘let’s stop’. But they started it,” he said.
Putin admitted Kyiv had “got some results” from its refinery attacks and Russia had lost about 1% of its GDP. Ukraine maintains it began attacking Russian oil infrastructure because it helped the Kremlin finance the war.
Russia has targeted Ukrainian energy infrastructure, ramping up attacks every winter since the war in Ukraine started in 2022. Other civilian infrastructure is also regularly hit, with a key bridge in Kyiv attacked by drones on Thursday.
Putin also accused the West of instigating other conflicts.
“If it comes to a direct attack on the Russian Federation, in this case we are talking about Kaliningrad but possibly some other territories, of course the issue of use by the Russian Federation of all arms at the disposal of our country will inevitably and immediately be on the agenda,” he said.
He accused Nato of holding naval manoeuvres in the Baltic Sea that he argued represented serious threats to Kaliningrad. If the territory came under Western blockade, he said Russia would be prepared to use all means and forces, including nuclear.
“We are not threatening anyone. We do not intend to attack anyone in 2029, in 2030, in 2050. But if we come across an aggression we will have to respond. Citizens of European countries should be fully aware of that.”
He added that while he was aware of the nuclear capabilities of countries such as the UK and France, the weapons at its disposal were unparalleled.
Western officials have long feared that, rather than invading Kaliningrad, Russia would use the relatively small distance between the exclave and ally Belarus – known as the Suwalki Gap – were it to attempt to seize Lithuanian territory by force.
Lithuania’s prime minister told the BBC last week that his country had made evacuation plans in case Russia invaded and thousands of Nato troops are stationed there.
Nato Secretary General Mark Rutte made clear on Wednesday that none of the alliance’s “exercises or activities” posed any threat to Moscow and that the Kremlin’s messaging was “absolutely not called for and not helpful”.
Putin spent some time talking about leading countries in the world having armaments at their disposal that could “wipe away all life or at least push the Earth to catastrophic consequences”, and said that unfortunately no one could be sure they would never be used.
He drew the analogy of a gun sitting on a theatre stage – if it was hanging there at the start of the show, it would certainly be fired at the end.
He appeared to call for the rules of warfare to be rewritten and warned of the increasing risk of artificial intelligence.
“The automation and digitalisation of warfare leads to its gamification. This leads to degradation and sliding back of humanity to barbarity,” he said.
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