However, would you think that it ends here? After what happened until this point, wouldn’t it be a bit odd to end here? I felt so too. Putin responded with a newly-found tranquillity on NATO, that was followed by…a warning. “The expansion of military infrastructure into this territory would definitely provoke a response from us.” As he said.
There you go. That’s the Putin we knew.
As he proceeded, “what the response will consist of- we will see what threats we will have to face.” he told the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) leaders, including Belarus, Armenia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan.
The Kremlin president’s apparent calm response to one of the worst geopolitical fears of Russia – the post-Soviet enlargement of NATO – is somehow in contrast to a much stricter language that came from his foreign minister and senior allies.
Before Putin, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov mentioned that the West shouldn’t have any illusions that Moscow will simply put up with the Nordic expansion of NATO. The comments were, as you well imagined, broadcasted on state television.
One of Putin’s closest allies, former President Dmitry Medvedev, declared last month that Russia might deploy nuclear weapons and even hypersonic missiles on the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad, only if Finland and Sweden would join NATO.
