Putin warns the West a Russia-Nato conflict is just one step from WW3

MOSCOW: Russian President Vladimir Putin warned the West on Monday that a direct conflict between Russia and the US-led Nato military alliance would mean the planet was one step away from World War Three but said hardly anyone wanted such a scenario.

The Ukraine war has triggered the deepest crisis in Moscow’s relations with the West since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. Putin has often warned of the risks of nuclear war but says he has never felt the need to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine.

French President Emmanuel Macron last month said he could not rule out the deployment of ground troops in Ukraine in the future, with many Western countries distancing themselves from that while others, especially in eastern Europe, expressed support.

Asked by Reuters about the Macron remarks and the risks and possibility of a conflict between Russia and Nato, Putin quipped: “everything is possible in the modern world.”

“It is clear to everyone, that this will be one step away from a full-scale World War Three. I think hardly anyone is interested in this,” Putin told reporters after winning the biggest ever landslide in post-Soviet Russian history.

Putin added, though, that Nato military personnel were present already in Ukraine, saying that Russia had picked up both English and French being spoken on the battlefield.

“There is nothing good in this, first of all for them, because they are dying there and in large numbers,” he said.

Ahead of the March 15-17 Russian election, Ukraine stepped up attacks against Russia, shelling border regions and even used proxies to try to pierce Russia’s borders.

Asked if he considered it necessary to take Ukraine’s Kharkiv region, Putin said if the attacks continued, Russia would create a buffer zone out of more Ukrainian territory to defend Russian territory.

“I do not exclude that, bearing in mind the tragic events taking place today, we will be forced at some point, when we deem it appropriate, to create a certain ‘sanitary zone’ in the territories today under the Kyiv regime,” Putin said.

He declined to give any further details but said such a zone might have to be big enough to preclude foreign made armaments from reaching Russian territory.

Putin ordered a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, triggering major European war after eight years of conflict in eastern Ukraine between Ukrainian forces on one side and pro-Russian Ukrainians and Russian proxies on the other.

Putin said he wished Macron would stop seeking to aggravate the war in Ukraine but to play a role in finding peace: “It seems that France could play a role. All is not lost yet.”

“I’ve been saying it over and over again and I’ll say it again. We are for peace talks, but not just because the enemy is running out of bullets,” Putin said. —Reuters

Meanwhile, a day after securing a new six-year term, Russian President Vladimir Putin appeared briefly at an open-air concert on Red Square on Monday to mark the 10th anniversary of Russia’s annexation of Crimea from Ukraine. The annexation of the Black Sea peninsula was a precursor to Moscow’s seizure of four other Ukraine regions in 2022 that it has declared parts of Russia, in actions condemned as illegal by most countries at the United Nations.

Putin told a large, flag-waving crowd that the “return” of those other regions to Russia had turned out to be “much more grave and tragic” than Crimea’s, but it had been accomplished.

Two years after Putin launched what he calls his “special military operation”, Russia has not fully captured the four regions, but voting in Russia’s three-day presidential election that ended on Sunday was held in the parts of Ukraine that its forces control. Ukraine said the exercise was illegal and void. Putin said officials had reported early on Monday that rail links had been restored from Rostov in southern Russia to the Russian-controlled cities of Donetsk, Mariupol and Berdyansk, and further upgrades would follow.