Putin Says He Weighed Nuclear Alert Over Crimea |
Posted: March 15, 2015 |
MOSCOW — After the revolution in Ukraine last year, President Vladimir V. Putin sent military forces to secure Crimea and even weighed puttingRussia’s nuclear arsenal on alert because of his concerns about both anarchy and Western intervention, the Russian leader said in a documentary broadcast Sunday. The documentary, called “Homeward Bound,” was produced by the state-run Rossiya 1 channel to celebrate the anniversary of the March 21, 2014, annexation of Crimea, the Black Sea peninsula that was given to Ukraine in 1954 when both were a part of the Soviet Union. The film presented the events as a triumph of security planning and execution, with Mr. Putin at its heart. Throughout the documentary, which ran for two and a half hours, Mr. Putin tried both to justify the move — which most Western nations considered outside international law and led to economic sanctions that have magnified Russia’s current, oil-related recession — and to boast about it. “The overall tone is upbeat: Russia’s greatness and fulsomeness being restored,” wrote Dmitri V. Trenin, the head of the Carnegie Moscow Center, in response to a question via email. “With respect to the U.S./West: keep away from this, it’s our people, our historical land, our stakes are so much higher than yours, we will always outbid you if necessary.” Russia’s Endgame in UkraineGRAPHICHow Russia aims to achieve its goal of keeping Ukraine isolated from the West. The documentary appeared as a mood of unease gripped Moscow, not least because Mr. Putin has not been seen in public since March 5. His sudden withdrawal followed the Feb. 27 assassination of an opposition leader near the Kremlin, a killing that some analysts have suggested was rooted in a rivalry between different branches of the security services. Mr. Putin is scheduled to reappear in public on Monday, when he is supposed to meet the president of Kyrgyzstan in St. Petersburg. The takeover of Crimea, the site of an important Russian naval base, proved wildly popular with Russians, who always considered it a part of the motherland. In the aftermath, Mr. Putin’s approval rating rose as high as 88 percent, even though the annexation and subsequent Russian support for separatists in Ukraine brought Moscow’s relations with the West to their lowest point since the Cold War. “I was speaking with colleagues and said, ‘Frankly, this is our historical territory and Russian people live there, they were in danger, and we cannot abandon them,’ ” he said in the documentary. Before now, Mr. Putin had emphasized that he had felt compelled to act after the overwhelming majority of Crimeans approved a referendum on joining Russia. That element remains, but in the latest version Mr. Putin puts a much greater stress on the abrupt manner in which President Viktor F. Yanukovych of Ukraine was overthrown and on his own concerns about a potential Western military reaction. “We never thought about severing Crimea from Ukraine until the moment that these events began, the government overthrow,” he said. Russia has never accepted the idea that Mr. Yanukovych was toppled by a popular revolution, instead saying that Europe and particularly the United States engineered the crowds that camped out in Kiev’s Maidan square for months and eventually brought down the government on Feb. 21, 2014. “The real puppeteers were our American partners and friends,” Mr. Putin said. Mr. Putin said that he told his security chiefs at dawn on Feb. 23, after an all-night meeting, that it was time to start planning for the return of Crimea to Russia. He also said that concerns that the West might intervene militarily prompted him to consider putting Russia’s nuclear weapons on alert. He was ready to face “the worst possible turn of events,” he said, but ultimately decided it was unnecessary. During the Soviet period, when Russia was considered a superpower, its nuclear arsenal was rarely if ever mentioned. More recently, as the West has categorized Russia as weak and not that important, the government and the state-run news media have repeatedly made not-so-subtle mention of the country’s nuclear abilities. Mr. Putin said he sent thousands of troops, particularly the special forces, to secure Crimea and to ensure that some 20,000 Ukrainian soldiers there did not try to control it. “We monitored the situation and had to bring in our equipment,” Mr. Putin said. “They would have been wiped out after the first salvo.”
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