MOSCA – The US president Joe Biden he can also reassure as much as he wants by saying that the sending of Abrams tanks to Kiev “is not an offensive threat against Russia”. The argument “will not work,” warned the Russian ambassador in Washington Anatoly Antonov even before hearing his address to the nation. “If the United States decided to supply tanks – he wrote on Facebook the day before – it would be another blatant provocation”.
If the threats of recent days of “nuclear conflict” and “global catastrophe” were not enough, the Russian authorities once again reiterated yesterday that the new Western arms supplies to Kiev will only raise the conflict in Ukraine “to a new level of comparison”. Word from the Russian ambassador in Berlin Sergej Nechaev who called sending German Leopards to Kiev “an extremely dangerous decision” and accused Germany of having “renounced its historical responsibility for the crimes committed by Nazism” during the Second World War. “Tanks with German crosses will again be sent to the ‘Eastern Front’ inevitably leading to the deaths of Russian soldiers but also civilians,” she evoked. The propagandist-in-chief is less diplomatic Vladimir Solovyov who on live TV railed against “new Nazi leaders bred and brought to power” in Germany. “European Pharisees, Nazi fuckers!” she yelled.
There was no lack of reaction from the spokeswoman for the Russian Foreign Ministry Maria Zakharova. The German decision, he said, is evidence of what he called a “pre-planned war” against Moscow. Himself words of the Kremlin spokesman, Dmitry Peskovin response to Michael Podolyakadviser to the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, which had heralded “an escalation”. Kiev only confirms “the correctness of the road taken and of the intention of wanting to protect us from such a danger”, commented Peskov. But he also feigned superiority: “Western overestimate the potential the supplies will bring to the Ukrainian army. These tanks will burn like any other.”
Russian TV makes fun of Abrams tanks: “Unsuitable for snow”. But analysts: “They are a problem”
from our correspondent Rosalba Castelletti
The Russian president Vladimir Putin, however, avoided any direct comment. While visiting Moscow State University, she gave advice to students and answered their questions for over an hour on everything from lost dogs to quantum technology. You mentioned Ukraine in passing. When a student said he took care of his 9, 10 and 16-year-old brothers after his mother left to work as a nurse at the front. Or when a boy named Vladislav from the Lugansk region of eastern Ukraine, annexed by Moscow last September, said he had taken part in the so-called “special military operation” and wanted to work for the FSB.
The Russian president limited himself to reiterating that the purpose of the offensive against Kiev is “to protect Russia itself from the threats they are trying to create in the historical territories adjacent to us”. “We can’t allow that,” he added peremptorily. He alluded to the current international tensions by commenting that Germany is under “military occupation” by the United States “legally and in fact”: a reference to the allied troops stationed in the NATO country. But he said he was sure that one day “sovereignty will be returned to Europe”, even if “it seems that it will take some time”. A similar reminder came from Zakharova to the Italian foreign minister Antonio Tajani who lamented the absence of a real EU foreign policy. “Don’t you understand that the US is dragging you into a big war? Europe urgently needs to wake up from its lethargic sleep and finally remember that it was the US that benefited from the previous two world wars,” he wrote on Telegram.
But the real response to the Alliance came from the Atlantic where the Russian Defense simulated the launch of a Zirkon hypersonic missile from the Admiral frigate Gorshkov which will soon reach the Indian Ocean to take part in joint exercises with South Africa and China at the turn of the first anniversary of the Russian offensive in Ukraine. The ministry exceptionally showed the images of the test. This time there was no need to get lost in too many rounds of words.