First the stick, then the carrot. This is the strategy Vladimir Putin after a thousand days of war in Ukraine. After announcing that Russia will respond to any country whose missiles are used to hit targets in Moscow’s territory, the Kremlin leader made it clear that he remains open to any contact to achieve a “peaceful trajectory” and a de-escalation of the conflict.
Through its spokesperson Dmitry Peskov, Russia reiterated that “as regards openness to dialogue, even in yesterday’s statement, the president underlined his availability for any contact with a view to de-escalation, to avoid further escalation and to achieve a peaceful trajectory. Therefore, this openness of the president to contacts was, is and remains relevant to this day, the head of state himself said so.” A loud and clear message to Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky.
The Kremlin also clarified that Putin had no contact with the incumbent US administration after the launch of a Russian Oreshnik ballistic missile with a conventional warhead over Ukrainian territory. “There have been no contacts with the current administration. On the other hand, Putin’s statement yesterday was quite comprehensive, clear and logical. Therefore, we have no doubt that the current administration in Washington had the opportunity to study and understand this statement,” Peskov underlined. In other words: the message Washington needed to receive, it received. Without further room for interpretation.
It is no mystery that the launch of the missile mentioned above against a plant of the Ukrainian military industrial sector already opened in the Soviet era in Dnipro was a performative act. A way to multiply the alarm without actually causing it, even if taking it lightly would be a huge mistake. The usual reversible step on the escalation ladder. “It is part of Moscow’s broader strategy to cloud the crossing of a threshold with language that suggests that the threshold has not been fully crossed or that it can be reversed,” underlined Carnegie Russia Eurasia analyst Alexander Baunov.
Anything but random tip-off published in the media on Wednesday, complete with an alert to Western embassies in Kiev, some of which – starting with Italy and the USA – closed for twenty-four hours as a precautionary measure. And, again, the spokesperson of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Maria Zakharova which yesterday was interrupted in the middle of a briefing with journalists by a phone call audible to everyone in the room in which she was instructed not to talk about the missile, with the video published on the MID website, highlights Adnkronos. The definitive certification arrived with the speech of Putin to the country broadcast last night on TV in which the Tsar talks about “one of the new missile systems to which our engineers have given the name “Oreshkin”.
In all this whirlwind of words, continues the conflict on the fieldespecially the Russian bombing of Ukraine. During the night between Thursday and Friday, two air raids were recorded in the Sumy region which caused two victims. Moscow, however, has denounced the presence of at least twenty-three Ukrainian drones in the skies over Russian territory. The attacks ordered by Putin have pushed the Ukrainian Parliament to cancel today’s session due to fear of new attacks. Rada stops the testimony of several deputies to the AFP due to “signs of an increased risk of attacks against the government quarter in the coming days”.
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