Putin to reporter Pavel Zarubin: 'NATO will be at war with us and our response will be appropriate to the perceived threat'

Yesterday Putin had a very full day in St Petersburg as reported extensively on Russian state television news programs.

In the morning, at the Konstantinovsky Palace on the shores of the Gulf of Finland, he met in the round with the national security directors of the BRICS countries to discuss preparations for the October summit in Kazan. At this group session, Putin announced that the summit is expected to approve a new category of relationship designated as 'partnership' with those 34 countries which have expressed an interest in joining the club. This session was followed by side meetings with the representatives from India, Iran and China.

With India the chief topic was the planned one-on-one with Prime Minister Modi in Kazan to review the implementation of mutual undertakings they had agreed during Modi's visit to Moscow a couple of months ago. With Iran, Putin heard reassurances that the policy of former prime minister Raisi is continuing in full under his successor, Masoud Pezeshkian. They surely discussed the planned signing in Kazan of a comprehensive agreement on strategic partnership. China was represented by their Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi, who assured Putin that President Xi will be coming to Kazan and looks forward to side meetings there with 'his good friend' Vladimir Vladimirovich. Yi reported to Putin on his recent trip to Kiev and talks with Zelensky.

The Russian president next was busy with Russian Orthodox church matters. He joined Patriarch Kirill at the Alexander Nevsky Lavra (monastery) to light a candle at the tomb of the legendary medieval prince who defended the Rus' from German invaders as a warrior and who by his diplomatic talents established an acceptable modus vivendi with the Mongol conquerors of that age. Yesterday was the day commemorating Alexander Nevsky in the city for whom he is the patron saint. A well attended and colorful march of clergy and laymen started from the Lavra and proceeded down the city's principal thoroughfare, Nevsky Prospekt.

Putin's afternoon was then spent at the opening ceremony of this year's Cultural Forum which is always a big event in St Petersburg of national and international importance, combining both musical and other performances for the general public and dozens if not hundreds of separate themed talks and seminars by experts on topics relating to the year's central theme.

This year, as in the past several years, the central venue for the Forum is the former General Staff building of tsarist Russia, now part of the Hermitage art museum complex. The grand staircase inside is occasionally, like yesterday fitted with cushions directly on the stairs, creating an august three story high open space that seats several hundred.

The theme of the Forum this year is United Cultures and in his lengthy address to participants, among whom were many foreign invitees, Putin spoke of culture in terms of the new multipolar world that is open to diverse national cultural traditions and in which no one country or group of countries impose their 'values' on others. Yes, Russia's ideological battle against the U.S. global hegemony is being fought on many fronts, including Soft Power.

In between these various activities, all of which demanded great concentration, the Russian president found the time to give an interview, on the fly, so to speak. He was standing just outside the General Staff building on a side street where it joins Palace Square, on the other side of which stands the main body of the Hermitage in the former Winter Palace of the tsars. Pavel Zarubin, a journalist who seems to follow Vladimir Vladimirovich everywhere to gather material for his weekly Sunday evening show 'Moscow, the Kremlin, Putin' put to him the question that is as much on the minds of Russians as it is on the mind of us here in the West: how will Russia respond to the expected American and British go-ahead to Zelensky for use of their missiles to attack the heartland of Russia. Putin gave his answer speaking in a calm and deliberate tone. What he said has been picked up by global media, many of which have presented it to world audiences as being bellicose. It was not bellicose but it was open to various interpretations because its essence is that Russia's response will be calibrated to the level of threat to itself that it sees in any coming attacks from Ukraine.

But before getting to the 'punch line' that everyone awaited, President Putin explained Russia's understanding that what is at issue goes far beyond mere permission for Ukraine to use Western supplied long-range offensive weapons as it sees fit. Per Russian military evaluation, Ukraine by itself does not possess the satellite reconnaissance capability necessary to program the NATO-supplied missiles to target. For this it is totally dependent on NATO countries. More important still, Ukraine does not have the training, the skills to maintain and launch these missiles on its own. Two or three weeks training is utterly inadequate to manage these highly sophisticated weapons systems. Accordingly all of those functions must necessarily be carried out by technical people from the NATO country manufacturers of the weapons. For these reasons, Russia concludes that the missiles effectively represent NATO's direct involvement in the conflict. The status of the conflict moves on from a proxy war to a full-blown war by NATO countries on Russia. That change in the nature of the war requires a change in the way Russia conducts itself. As Putin said, Russia will calibrate its response to any attack to the level of threat it perceives. Period.

I add to this briefing what Russian talk shows on state television were saying last night about this whole question of the level of threat posed by Zelensky's right to use the missiles as he sees fit. The fact is that Russia is mentally prepared for anything that the West can throw at it today via Ukraine, up to and including, for example, a missile attack on the Kursk nuclear power plant. Due to its unprotected outer structure, a strike there could result in a leakage of radioactivity similar to the Chernobyl catastrophe. We should not doubt that a Russian response to such an incident will be memorable if any of us survives it.

Accordingly, we must hope that Antony Blinken, Jake Sullivan and other demented leading personalities in the Biden administration will be shunted aside by Pentagon generals who necessarily have a more sober understanding of the means of retaliation at Moscow's disposal today.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2024