The humiliation of the Russian military has been ongoing for nearly a year now, and it has created a rather stunning change in rhetoric from within the Kremlin.
At this point, all Russia can do to keep from slipping even further down the global pecking order is to blatantly threaten the rest of the world with abject destruction. Their armies are inefficient and shedding troops like a tree sheds leaves after the first frost. The “harsh winter” tactics they’ve tried have failed as well, leaving nothing but an improvement in efficiency for Ukraine in a few weeks’ time.
Now, with the west continuing to send ever-more powerful weapons to Ukraine, Russian politicians are ratcheting up their rhetoric to an obscene degree.
Continued deliveries of arms to Ukraine by its allies in the West will lead to retaliation with “more powerful weapons,” a top official in Russian President Vladimir Putin’s regime said on Sunday.
Vyacheslav Volodin, chairman of Russia’s lower house, the State Duma, threatened Europe and the U.S. with “global catastrophe” over their continued military support to the government in Kyiv, which is trying to continue retaking territory it lost in the Russian invasion.
Volodin directly invoked the use of nuclear weapons in his statement over messaging app Telegram.
There was no mistaking what Volodin was getting at.
“Arguments that the nuclear powers have not previously used weapons of mass destruction in local conflicts are untenable. This is because these states have not faced a situation in which the security of their citizens and the territorial integrity of their countries were threatened,” the Russian official wrote in his social media post.
Of course, Russia’s use of a nuclear weapon would almost certainly lure the global community into a more direct involvement in Ukraine, which is something that the Russia army is surely trying to avoid.
