In a bid to deter the Western world over his invasion of Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the nuclear deterrent forces on high alert Sunday. In a televised address, Putin said that he had ordered the defence minister and the chief of the general staff of the Russian armed forces to place deterrence forces into a special combat mode.
‘As you can see, not only do Western countries take unfriendly measures against our country in the economic dimension – I mean the illegal sanctions that everyone knows about very well – but also the top officials of leading NATO countries allow themselves to make aggressive statements with regards to our country,’ he added. As a response, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said, ‘We’ve seen this time and time again. At no point has Russia been threatened by NATO or Ukraine’.
‘This is all a pattern from President Putin and we’re going to stand up to it. We have the ability to defend ourselves, but we also need to call out what we’re seeing here from President Putin,’ Psaki added. The announcement comes after Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko stated that the country would turn to Russia if the United States deployed nuclear weapons in Poland or Lithuania.
This possibility was brought up in Lukashenko’s conversation with French President Emmanuel Macron. ‘If the United States, or France … transfer nuclear weapons to Poland, to Lithuania, to our borders, … I will appeal to [Russian President Vladimir] Putin to return the weapons that I once gave without any preconditions,’ Lukashenko said.
On Sunday, Ukrainian forces fought Russian troops pushing into Kharkiv, on day four of an invasion that has shaken Europe’s long-standing security architecture and forced Germany to spend more on its defenses. It is the largest attack on a European state since World War II that Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered from three angles against Ukraine. To date, the assault, which Russia calls a special operation, has not succeeded in toppling Kyiv’s government or capturing major cities. Instead, it has forced hundreds of thousands of refugees, mostly women and children, into neighboring countries.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky stated that he believes in fighting for his country and for his freedom. 198 people have been killed over the weekend, including three children, according to the Ukrainian health ministry. More than 1,000 others have been hurt. As part of a new round of sanctions aimed at imposing severe penalties on Moscow for its invasion of Ukraine, the United States, the European Union, and the United Kingdom agreed to block ‘selected Russian banks from using the SWIFT global financial messaging system. SWIFT is used by over 11,000 banks and financial institutions worldwide.
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