Vladimir Putin He spent much of the four and a half hours of his year-in-review speech calling crazy those who fuel fear of Russia and insist that the Kremlin’s idea is to attack Europe and NATO within five years or less.
The rest of the time he spent threatening Europe itself and NATO itself with open war if Russia was not treated “with respect” and the geopolitical blunder of isolating Kaliningrad, a Russian enclave between Lithuania and Poland, was committed.
“If such threats are made against us, we will destroy them. Such actions will simply lead to an unprecedented escalation of the conflict, bring it to a completely different level and expand it into a full-scale armed conflict,” he said.
In other words, yes, Russia is ready for war with Europe and even that is not new, since Putin himself declared this last month to anyone who will listen.
Of course, the verbal escalation itself is already worrying. In recent weeks, we have moved from more or less distant hypotheses to assertions of Marc Rutte saying that we must prepare for “a great war, like the one that our grandfathers and great-grandfathers fought” and the last two warnings from Putin already mentioned.
Fear in the Baltics
Those who feel this escalation the most are the Baltic countries. Their governments have long acted as if the Russian invasion was inevitable and know that they will be the first with whom Putin will test his true commitment to NATO’s famous Article 5 on mutual support in the event of attack.
As the former national security advisor said this Thursday: John Boltonreferring to promises made to Ukraine, “if Trump doesn’t believe in NATO Article 5, how can he believe in Article 5-like guarantees?”
It is obvious that the Europeans are not going to block Kaliningrad. Another thing would be a false flag attack that would justify armed action, but Putin doesn’t even know how he is doing in the armed action he already undertook four years ago, only to trigger another.
In his speech, he again referred to Kupiansk, this time to say that it is about to fall. Just a month ago, he said he had already fallen. Is it possible that an army that fails to break the siege of a destroyed city in eastern Kharkiv dares to challenge the entire West? You should see it.
On December 12, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Sergey Lavrovdemanded that Finland leave NATO, an organization it only joined in 2023, when it saw its neighbor’s beard peeling off.
Recently, imperialist discourses have been revived around certain territories close to the Republic of Karelia, a region that the Finns had to cede to the Soviet Union at the end of the Second World War.
Likewise, pressure continues to grow on Estonia, where the government has denounced the illegal incursion of three Russian soldiers, which can only be understood as a new act of provocation.
The soldiers marched near the Narva River for about twenty minutes, after which they returned to their country. In a context of extreme tension between Russia and its neighboring members of the Atlantic Alliance, it is difficult to imagine a fortuitous act.
French President Emmanuel Macron during the meeting this Thursday in Brussels
Macron asks Europe to talk to Putin
For his part, the French president, Emmanuel Macronsurprised this Friday with public statements in which he urged Europe to talk to Putin again and resume negotiations directly with the Kremlin in the coming weeks.
The reason given by Macron is that at present it is others – with clear reference to the United States – who are talking to Russia, which leaves Europe out of the equation.
The French president believes that the only way for the old continent to regain the dynamics of negotiations is to address Moscow directly. Otherwise, in his words, “we just talk to each other” without any progress.
Macron had already called Putin over the diplomatic wall surrounding the Russian leader last July. The conversation was harshly criticized in France and abroad and, honestly, it served no purpose.
Putin now understands that his only interlocutor is Donald Trumpwho is responsible for doing his dirty work diplomatically. The American president thus insisted on Friday that Ukraine must “act quickly” on territorial issues, since Russia “already does it”.
Trump is obvious that the only thing Russia needs to do is occupy the land that Ukraine supposedly has to give up for nothing. And yet, formally, Putin has never declared that the model of “peace for the territories” satisfied him. Before, on the contrary.
In his end-of-year speech, Putin repeated everything that his Western propagandists insist on omitting: the causes of the conflict go far beyond this or that province and must be resolved. Until they do this and fully comply with Russian demands, there will be no peace in Ukraine. He even knows it Steve Wittkoff. And if you don’t know it, you must understand that Jared Kushner He must have explained it to her during one of their joint trips.
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