> we put our guy at its head a couple years ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Ukrainian_presidential_el... this is denying that ukraine has agency of its own. Nobody put a guy anywhere. He was elected.
> we will bring forth the apocalypse.
The only country that is threating 1st strike is Russia.
Note that I absolutely do not agree that anybody but Ukrainian people put Poroshenko there, just pointing out you're looking at the wrong elections to counter this narrative.
2. He says "We will protect our land with all the forces and means at our disposal and will do everything to ensure the safe life of our people. This is the great liberation mission of our people." The key point here is "our land" - this includes the newly annexed oblasts "all the forces and means at our disposal" - this includes nuclear forces.
In other words he is saying that Russia can use nuclear forces to protect Donetsk / Luhansk / Crima from Ukraine.
now please send those 1000 bitcoins to UA: https://savelife.in.ua/en/donate-en/#donate-army-crypto
Lavrov won't literally say "if the USA sends one more weapons shipment to Ukraine, we will drop a nuke on every Ukranian troop concentration we can find", because then they would look weak when it turns out they won't do it after all.
This is why all Russia's nuclear threats are veiled and implied. But make no mistake, they are there, and the message one can read between the lines is put there intentionally. It might be an empty threat or it isn't, but a threat it certainly is.
There are certainly concrete and non-ambiguous threats made behind the scenes, making explicit what actions each party is willing to commit to, but those don't end up in the media.
Such as “escorting” warplanes away from borders or being caught spying on sensitive military installations/procedures.
No nuke, so far.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-02-24/full-tran...
> I would now like to say something very important for those who may be tempted to interfere in these developments from the outside. No matter who tries to stand in our way or all the more so create threats for our country and our people, they must know that Russia will respond immediately, and the consequences will be such as you have never seen in your entire history. No matter how the events unfold, we are ready. All the necessary decisions in this regard have been taken. I hope that my words will be heard.
http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/69390
> They have even resorted to the nuclear blackmail. I am referring not only to the Western-encouraged shelling of the Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant, which poses a threat of a nuclear disaster, but also to the statements made by some high-ranking representatives of the leading NATO countries on the possibility and admissibility of using weapons of mass destruction – nuclear weapons – against Russia.
> I would like to remind those who make such statements regarding Russia that our country has different types of weapons as well, and some of them are more modern than the weapons NATO countries have. In the event of a threat to the territorial integrity of our country and to defend Russia and our people, we will certainly make use of all weapon systems available to us. This is not a bluff.
http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts/69465
> The United States is the only country in the world that has used nuclear weapons twice, destroying the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan. And they created a precedent.
Whatever you think of Yanukovych and the people who followed him, the US getting so heavily involved in a country right on Russia's doorstep was a very risky move. There have been warnings from several prominent American foreign policy analysts about how this sort of action would prompt an extreme reaction from Russia. George Kennan, the father of the US' Cold War containment strategy, was extremely prescient, all the way back in 1998:
> "Of course there is going to be a bad reaction from Russia, and then [the NATO expanders] will say that we always told you that is how the Russians are - but this is just wrong. [...] This has been my life, and it pains me to see it so screwed up in the end."[1]
If both Russia and the US continue to push maximalist positions, this conflict will just escalate and escalate, and nobody can say where it will end.
0. Recorded call from 2014 between high-level US State Department officials, in which they work out who should go in what position in the Ukrainian government: https://youtu.be/JoW75J5bnnE
1. George Kennan discussing NATO expansion in 1998: http://www.nytimes.com/1998/05/02/opinion/foreign-affairs-no...