Putin Says West Risks Nuclear Conflict if It Intervenes More in Ukraine

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February 29

President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia said the West faced the prospect of nuclear conflict if it intervened more directly in the war in Ukraine, using an annual speech to the nation on Thursday to escalate his threats against Europe and the United States.

Mr. Putin said NATO countries that were helping Ukraine strike Russian territory or might consider sending their own troops "must, in the end, understand" that "all this truly threatens a conflict with the use of nuclear weapons, and therefore the destruction of civilization."

"We also have weapons that can strike targets on their territory," Mr. Putin said. "Do they not understand this?"

The Russian leader alluded to comments by President Emmanuel Macron of France this week raising the possibility of sending troops from NATO countries to Ukraine, a scenario the Kremlin said would lead to the "inevitability" of a direct conflict between Russia and the Western alliance.

The United States and other Western governments have largely tried to distance themselves from Ukrainian strikes on Russian territory, and Mr. Macron's remarks about the possibility of Western troops being sent to Ukraine drew quick rebukes from other Western officials, who have ruled out such deployments.

Mr. Putin, however, considers Russian-occupied Ukraine to be Russian territory, and he seized on Mr. Macron's remarks to amplify his threat. "We remember the fate of those who once sent their contingents to the territory of our country," Mr. Putin said, an apparent reference to the invasions of Hitler and Napoleon. "But now the consequences for potential interventionists will be much more tragic."

Mr. Putin's threats on Thursday came in the opening minutes of his annual state-of-the-nation speech, a keystone event in the Kremlin calendar in which the president declares his plans and priorities in a televised address to hundreds of officials, lawmakers and other members of Russia's ruling elite.

This year, the speech took on added significance because of Russia's presidential elections, scheduled for March 15-17, in which Mr. Putin is running for another six-year term. He is assured of winning, but the Kremlin has mounted a concerted publicity campaign ahead of the vote, seeking to use it as a stamp of public approval for Mr. Putin's rule, and by extension, his war.

The speech came at a geopolitically delicate time: More than two years into the war, Russia has taken the initiative on the battlefield, military aid is stalled in the U.S. Congress, and Western governments are at odds over how best to support Ukraine.

At home, Mr. Putin is showing no sign of slowing his crackdown on the opposition, which suffered a crushing blow with the death of its imprisoned leader, Aleksei A. Navalny.

"Russia's political system is one of the foundations of the country's sovereignty," Mr. Putin said in his speech, suggesting he would continue to stifle what he casts as Western-organized dissent. "We will not let anyone interfere in our domestic affairs."

Mr. Putin has repeatedly made veiled nuclear threats against the West since he launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine two years ago, seeking to leverage Russia's enormous nuclear arsenal to deter Europe and the United States from supporting Ukraine.

He had appeared to dial down that rhetoric in the past year. But on Thursday, he returned to it, coupling his threats with a claim that he was ready to resume arms-control negotiations with the United States — but only, he suggested, if Washington was ready to discuss the war in Ukraine as well.

"Russia is ready for a dialogue with the United States on matters of strategic stability," Mr. Putin said, a reference to arms-control talks with Washington that had been briefly underway before Russia's invasion.

In an apparent reference to Ukraine, Mr. Putin added: "This must, naturally, be done only as a single complex, including all those aspects that affect the security of our country."

Fyodor Lukyanov, a Moscow-based foreign-policy expert close to the Kremlin, said Mr. Putin's warnings were probably prompted by Mr. Macron's remark earlier in the week that "nothing should be ruled out" regarding the possibility of a NATO country sending troops to Ukraine.

More broadly, he added, Mr. Putin was responding to Western pledges to provide more powerful arms to Ukraine as Russia's battlefield advantage grows — including sending Kyiv missiles that could reach deeper inside Russian territory.

"Macron is not the only one who's starting to say that a Russian victory cannot be accepted," Mr. Lukyanov said. "In the West, they're not talking about a peace deal — they're talking about not letting Russia succeed."

Mr. Putin's goal, he said, was to avoid more direct Western involvement in the war and to "achieve negotiations on terms acceptable to Russia." In Thursday's speech, Mr. Putin signaled that he wanted those negotiations to encompass not just the future of Ukraine but also "equal and indivisible security in Eurasia."

Mr. Putin previously sought a sweeping security arrangement with NATO in late 2021, weeks before he launched his full-scale invasion. At the time, Western officials dismissed Russia's proposal as a nonstarter, because it would have codified a Russian sphere of influence across the former Soviet Union.

The White House, for its part, has rebuffed Mr. Putin's efforts to put the United States at the center of any negotiations about the war in Ukraine. American officials have said that the United States has not and will not negotiate on behalf of Ukraine.

Mr. Putin's threats against the West took up only a few minutes of a speech that lasted more than two hours. Much of the address focused on bread-and-butter domestic issues like highways, health care, energy infrastructure and education.

But Mr. Putin framed all those domestic priorities as being contingent on the success of his invasion of Ukraine, which the Kremlin refers to as the "special military operation." He offered no new details on the war's goals or how it might end, saying only that Russia aimed to "root out Nazism" — a reference to his frequent, false claims about Ukraine being run by "Nazis."

"I will underline the most important thing," Mr. Putin said at the end of his speech. "The fulfillment of all the targeted plans today depends directly on our soldiers, officers, volunteers — all the military personnel fighting right now on the front."

It was a signal that Mr. Putin intends to use his March re-election to portray Russia as committed to the war, with the overwhelming majority of the public behind it. Mr. Putin described the war's soldiers and supporters as Russia's "true elite," and unveiled a training program and other measures meant to elevate veterans to management positions in civilian life in areas like government, education and business.

With just more two weeks to go until the election, the Kremlin turned Mr. Putin's speech into a nationwide event. It was shown on billboards in Moscow and in movie theaters across the country, the Russian state media reported. And on social media, some celebrities rushed to show their fealty.

Among them: the television presenter Nastya Ivleyeva, who hosted the hedonistic, "almost naked" theme party in Moscow in December that became a reckoning for Russian stars seen as insufficiently adhering to the "traditional values" that Mr. Putin venerates.

"I watched the president's address for the first time this year," Ms. Ivleyeva wrote on the Telegram social messaging app. "The initiatives and projects that were announced sincerely resonate with me, and I know that I will vote for them."