The Kremlin warned NATO that supplying heavy and long-range weapons to Ukraine would escalate the war to a “whole new level.”
The newest warning came from Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov as he spoke with reporters about the possible shipment of heavy Western tanks and long-range missiles to the Ukrainian military.
“Potentially, this is extremely dangerous. It will mean bringing the conflict to a whole new level, which, of course, will not bode well from the point of view of global and pan-European security,” Peskov told reporters, according to the Moscow Times.
Peskov’s warning comes after two other high-profile warnings from Russian officials over recent Western talks regarding the possibility of sending top-of-the-line weaponry to Ukraine. Russian Ambassador to the United States Anatoly Antonov warned that Russia will destroy any weapons the U.S. sends to Ukraine. He invoked parallels with Nazi Germany.
“It should be clear for everyone — we will destroy any weapons supplied to the Zelensky’s regime by either the United States or NATO. That is true now as it was true during the Great Patriotic War,” he said, referring to the Russian term for World War II. “The emergence of tanks, bearing Nazi insignia, on the former Soviet soil unequivocally makes us aim at toppling the neo-Nazi regime in Ukraine and creating normal conditions so that the neighboring peoples in the region could live peacefully like in the old days.”
He also claimed that Western rhetoric around Crimea was “essentially pushing the Kyiv regime to carry out terrorist attacks in Russia. Hearing such remarks from Washington, the criminals in Kyiv will once again feel complete permissiveness. The risks of conflict escalation will only increase.”
Perhaps the greatest new threat came from former Russian President and close Putin ally Dmitri Medvedev. He mentioned the threat of nuclear war.
“Backward political good-timers in Davos reiterated: ‘To achieve peace, Russia must lose.’ None of them gets it that a nuclear power’s loss of a conventional war can lead to a nuclear one. Nuclear powers haven’t been defeated in major conflicts crucial for their destiny,” he said, hinting that Russia could resort to nuclear weapons in the case of a battlefield defeat.
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