Through invading Ukraine, President Vladimir Putin has turned Russia into an international pariah. Meanwhile, under the leadership of President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Ukraine vowed not to give ground at talks with Moscow as Ukrainian forces resisted a Russian invasion and Moscow put its nuclear forces on high alert. This invasion has already claimed dozens of civilian lives and could eventually displace up to 7 million people. Analysts said, Russia has become an international pariah as the forces do battle on the streets of Ukraine’s cities, facing a barrage of sanctions and banned from Western airspace and key financial networks.
Meanwhile, as Western countries lined up to send arms to Ukraine and impose suffocating sanctions, Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered Russia’s nuclear “deterrence forces” onto high alert. The United States, the world’s second largest nuclear power, slammed Putin’s order as totally unacceptable while Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said the move would not break his country’s resolve.
Ukraine’s military urged willing foreigners to travel to Ukraine “and fight side-by-side with Ukrainians against Russian war criminals”.
Escalating its punitive response, the West said it would remove some Russian banks from the SWIFT bank messaging system, and froze central bank assets — hitting Russia’s global trade.
A senior US official said a task force would hunt down Russian assets belonging to Russia’s influential billionaires.
The NATO alliance condemned Putin’s nuclear alert and has said it will, for the first time, deploy part of its rapid response force to the region to reassure eastern allies.
The Kremlin has so far brushed off sanctions, including those targeting Putin personally, as a sign of Western impotence.
Putin has said Russia’s actions are justified because it is defending Moscow-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine.
The rebels have been fighting Ukrainian government forces for eight years in a conflict that has killed more than 14,000 people.
Russian news agency TASS said, in response to aggressive statements in the West Russian President Vladimir Putin has issued orders to introduce what he described as a “special service regime” in the Russian army’s deterrence force.
“Top officials in NATO’s leading countries have been making aggressive statements against our country. For this reason, I give orders to the defense minister and chief of the General Staff to introduce a special combat service regime in the Russian army’s deference forces”, Putin said at a meeting with Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu and Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov in the Kremlin on Sunday.
Putin stressed that the Western countries were also taking unfriendly actions against Russia in the economic sphere.
“I am referring to the illegitimate sanctions, which are very well-known to everybody”, he added.
Commenting on Russian actions in Ukraine, Russia’s defense ministry’s spokesman, Igor Konashenkov said: “Russian servicemen are showing courage and heroism during the special military operation. But, regrettably, there are killed and wounded among them,” he said, adding that Russia’s losses are by far lesser than “losses among Ukrainian troops” and nationalists.
He also said that several Russian soldiers have been taken prisoner. “We know how Ukrainian Nazis are treating those few Russian servicemen who have been taken prisoner. We see that they use the same tortures as German Nazis during the Great Patriotic War (the Eastern Front during WWII where the former Soviet Union fought against Nazi Germany)”, he said.
He vowed that the Russian military will continue to treat surrendering Ukrainian troops in a humane way. “We understand that they took an oath to the people of Ukraine. All those surrendering arms and stopping resistance will be released to their families”, he stressed.
When clarifying the unfolding developments, the Russian Defense Ministry reassured that Russian troops are not targeting Ukrainian cities, but are limited to surgically striking and incapacitating Ukrainian military infrastructure. There are no threats whatsoever to the civilian population.
According to a credible source in Moscow, Russia may nationalize property of people registered in the US, the EU and other “unfriendly jurisdictions” amid new anti-Russian sanctions.
Quoting Russian Security Council Deputy Chairman Dmitry Medvedev, the source said, Russia is being threatened with arrests of assets of Russian citizens and companies abroad – “just like that, without any sanctions”, “in a carpet fashion”, “out of spite”. According to the politician, “this must be responded to in a quite symmetric manner”.
“With arrest of assets of foreigners and foreign companies in Russia based on country principle. And maybe, with nationalization of property of people registered in unfriendly jurisdictions. Like the EU, EU member states and a number of singing-along states of the Anglo-Saxon world that will take part in this” Medvedev said.
Russian President Vladimir Putin said in a televised address that in response to a request by the heads of the Donbass republics he had made a decision to carry out a special military operation in order to protect people “who have been suffering from abuse and genocide by the Kiev regime for eight years”.
Putin stressed that Moscow had no plans of occupying Ukrainian territories.
A number of states, including Western one, announced harsh sanctions against Russia. The EU imposed financial and technological sectoral restrictions against 64 key Russian agencies, including the Presidential Administration, Russian Defense Ministry, Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) and other state structures, as well as companies of military industrial, energy, plane building and financial sectors of Russia. These states also blacklisted a number of Russian politicians, including President Vladimir Putin, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and other Russian citizens.
While majority of the Western media are condemning Vladimir Putin for invading Ukraine, there is other side of the story. According to Professor Mark Galeotti:
Many Russians did indeed once think Putin was the leader Russia needed, and in fairness many Western leaders once believed that too, but the legitimacy of his regime has been in decline. Yes, Russians welcomed the annexation of Crimea, a peninsula they thought rightfully theirs, which they believed reflected the genuine desire of the Crimeans to “come home.” However, can this be considered an irredeemable sin?
Since then, Russians have not taken Putin’s increasingly bellicose and toxic rhetoric to heart. What independent polling we have suggests that, even if they are — or at least were — willing to believe the West was to blame for the crisis, that certainly did not translate into any desire to see Ukraine invaded, let alone see their boys die fighting their Ukrainian counterparts.
The Kremlin would be delighted if we treated all 144 million Russians as its willing collaborators, as if there were no difference between oligarchs running Kremlin slush funds and journalists justifying its rhetoric claiming that the West is hatefully Russophobic.
