Putin’s baseless accusations against Ukraine, from genocide to atomic bombs

Vladimir Putin redoubled this week his incendiary rhetoric against Ukraine and its leaders, a neo-Nazi regime according to him, which he accuses without evidence of committing genocide in the east and of wanting to obtain an atomic bomb.

His address to the nation on Monday was welcomed by his MPs and supporters, but caused outrage elsewhere. The French presidency called it an “ideological drift”.

Here are some of Putin’s accusations:

Genocide

This accusation has been repeated more and more since December, while some 150,000 armed Russian soldiers are camped on the Ukrainian borders, according to Western estimates.

Putin claimed that Ukraine is carrying out a policy of extermination of Russian-speakers in the east of the country.

In his speech on Monday, Putin accused Ukraine, a country with no historical legitimacy according to him, of having a Western-sponsored “neo-Nazi” regime to exterminate Russian-speaking Donbass.

“The so-called civilized world, of which our Western colleagues are the only representatives, prefers to turn a blind eye, as if these horrors did not exist, to the genocide suffered by four million people,” he said, accusing Kiev of banning the Russian language. .

The war in eastern Ukraine, a Russian-speaking region, has left 14,000 dead, including many civilians.

As for the language, Ukraine has not banned Russian, which is still widely spoken, but has adopted a law that imposes Ukrainian in the public space and in the media, a text criticized by several international NGOs.

The Ukrainian government recalls that the country was forcibly Russified during the Soviet era and that for eight years it has suffered from Russian military aggression, including the annexation of the Crimean peninsula in 2014.

nuclear ambitions

Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said for the first time on Monday that Kiev wants to acquire an atomic bomb.

The Russian president took up the accusations in his speech on Monday and detailed them the following day at a press conference.

According to him, due to his Soviet heritage, “the only thing missing is a uranium enrichment system. But this is a technical issue, and for Ukraine it is not an insoluble problem.”

Putin assures that Ukraine can develop tactical nuclear weapons by increasing the range of its missiles to 500 km, with which Moscow would be in the destruction zone. “For us it is a strategic threat,” he said.

Ukraine has never mentioned its nuclear ambitions. But its president did say that a 1994 agreement — the Budapest Memorandum, which provided for Russia to respect Ukraine’s territorial integrity in exchange for Kiev giving up its Soviet nuclear arsenal — seemed outdated.

Russia this week recognized the independence of pro-Russian separatists, which it has supported militarily for eight years.

NATO and total war

For weeks, Putin has been repeating that he wants to obtain “security guarantees”, that is, the end of the expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Alliance (NATO), especially to Ukraine, and the withdrawal of Alliance forces in the east of Europe.

According to him, Ukraine wants to recover the Crimean peninsula. And if Kiev joins NATO, it will try to do so, which would lead Russia and the West into a war between nuclear powers.

The Russian president also accused NATO and the United States on Monday of using regular military exercises in Ukraine as “cover for the rapid deployment of NATO military units on Ukrainian territory.”