Russia said a war with NATO would be inevitable if any EU member of the Western military alliance sent soldiers to fight in Ukraine. Responding to reporters on Tuesday, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that in such a case “we would need to talk not about the probability, but about the inevitability (of a direct conflict).”
Peskov remarked: “The very fact of discussing the possibility of sending certain contingents to Ukraine from NATO countries is a very important new element” when asked about French President Emmanuel Macron’s statements on Monday to European nations. Macron said sending troops to Ukraine had not been ruled out, although he cautioned that there was no consensus among EU member states at that stage.
NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg, however, drew a clear line from what Emmanuel Macron said, telling the Associated Press that “there are no plans to deploy NATO combat troops on Ukrainian soil.”
Relations between Russia and the West are at an all-time low, as the war in Ukraine has triggered the worst crisis in Russia’s relations with the West since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.
Peskov said that the West should ask themselves if such a scenario was in the interests of their countries and their peoples.
Russia and NATO have the world’s largest arsenals of nuclear weapons and a possible direct conflict could have dire consequences globally.
The latest military orders of the Russian president for the re-establishment of the military districts of Moscow and Leningrad revealed he is preparing for a possible large-scale war with NATO in the long term, according to a report by the Institute for the Study of War (ISW).
The US think tank noted that on Monday Putin signed the orders that reorganize the military and administrative structure of Russia. One order deprives the Northern Fleet of Russia, which was previously responsible for the territory in the Northwestern Federal District, of its status as a “branch strategic territorial association” or joint headquarters.
The other order officially reinstates the Military District of Leningrad and the Military District of Moscow, with the Military District of Leningrad taking over most of the territories previously under the Northern Fleet of Russia and the Military District of Moscow taking over most of the territories previously under the Western Military District, the think tank said in its latest analysis of the war in Ukraine.
In the second order signed by Putin, Russia also incorporates the four areas of Ukraine that Putin declared he annexed in the fall of 2022 – the areas of Kherson, Zaporizhia, Donetsk, and Luhansk – as well as Crimea, which has been held since 2014.
