©Reuters. Russian presidential candidate and incumbent President Vladimir Putin speaks after polling stations close, in Moscow, Russia March 18, 2024. REUTERS/Maxim Shemetov
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By Guy Faulconbridge
MOSCOW (Reuters) – Russian President Vladimir Putin warned the West on Monday that a direct conflict between Russia and the U.S.-led NATO military alliance would mean the planet was one step away from World War III, but he said almost no one would want such a scenario.
The war in Ukraine 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 weapons nuclear power in Ukraine.
French President Emmanuel Macron last month said he could not rule out deploying ground troops to Ukraine in the future, with many Western countries distancing themselves from it while others, especially in Eastern Europe, expressed support.
Asked by Reuters about Macron’s statements and the risks and possibility of conflict between Russia and NATO, Putin joked: “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 III. I think almost no one is interested in this,” Putin told reporters after winning the biggest landslide victory ever seen in post-Russian history. -Soviet.
Putin added, however, that NATO military personnel were already present in Ukraine, saying that Russia had noticed that both English and French were spoken on the battlefield.
“There is nothing good in this, first and foremost for them, because they are dying there and in large numbers,” he said.
HEART AREA
Ahead of Russia’s March 15-17 elections, Ukraine has stepped up attacks against Russia, bombing border regions and using proxies to try to breach Russia’s borders.
Asked whether he believed it was necessary to conquer Ukraine’s Kharkiv region, Putin said that if the attacks continued, Russia would create a buffer zone outside Ukrainian territory to defend Russian territory.
“I do not exclude that, taking into account the tragic events happening today, we will be forced sooner or later, when we deem it appropriate, to create a certain ‘health zone’ in the territories now under the Kiev regime,” Putin said. he said.
He declined to provide further details, but said that such a zone could be large enough to prevent foreign-made weapons from reaching Russian territory.
Putin ordered a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, triggering a major European war after eight years of conflict in eastern Ukraine between Ukrainian forces on one side and pro-Russian Ukrainians and Russian representatives on the other.
Putin said he would like Macron to stop trying to escalate the war in Ukraine but play a role in finding peace: “It seems that France could play a role. All is not lost yet.”
“I have said it over and over again and I will say it again. We are in favor of peace talks, but not only because the enemy is short of bullets,” Putin said.
“If they really want to seriously build peaceful and good-neighborly relations between the two states in the long term and not simply take a break for rearmament for 1.5-2 years.”
US DEMOCRACY
Putin has rejected US and Western criticism of the election, which the White House has called not free and fair, saying the US election was not democratic and criticizing the use of state power against Donald Trump.
“The whole world laughs at what is happening there,” Putin said of the United States. “It’s just a catastrophe, it’s not democracy, what the hell is it?”
Asked about the fate of opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who died in unexplained circumstances in a Russian prison in the Arctic on February 16, Putin said he was simply “dead,” using Navalny’s name for one of the first times in public.
Putin said he had agreed several days before Navalny’s death to swap him. Reuters reported in February that a prisoner swap deal had been agreed for Navalny shortly before his death.
“I said, ‘I agree,’” Putin said of his approval of the prisoner exchange. “I had one condition: we trade him but he will never come back.”
Navalny’s widow, Yulia, accused Putin of killing her husband. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters that the claim was simply wrong.