Quote (WiziLiCe @ Sep 27 2022 11:57am)
Russian nuclear threats IS aggression.
This meme that Putin threatened nuclear war in his address is one of those moments that makes it clear that you can't trust anything said in Western media about Official Enemies.
Putin did not threaten nuclear war, he was responding to Western nuclear threats, and reminding them that Russia has the ability to match nuclear escalation with their own nuclear deterrent.
http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts/69390
Here is the relevant section from that speech:
Quote
Washington, London and Brussels are openly encouraging Kiev to move the hostilities to our territory. They openly say that Russia must be defeated on the battlefield by any means, and subsequently deprived of political, economic, cultural and any other sovereignty and ransacked.
They have even resorted to the nuclear blackmail. I am referring not only to the Western-encouraged shelling of the Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant, which poses a threat of a nuclear disaster, but also to the statements made by some high-ranking representatives of the leading NATO countries on the possibility and admissibility of using weapons of mass destruction – nuclear weapons – against Russia.
I would like to remind those who make such statements regarding Russia that our country has different types of weapons as well, and some of them are more modern than the weapons NATO countries have. In the event of a threat to the territorial integrity of our country and to defend Russia and our people, we will certainly make use of all weapon systems available to us. This is not a bluff.
The citizens of Russia can rest assured that the territorial integrity of our Motherland, our independence and freedom will be defended – I repeat – by all the systems available to us. Those who are using nuclear blackmail against us should know that the wind rose can turn around.
And for further reading on how this is being digested in Russia:
https://globalaffairs.ru/articles/vernite-strah/The fear is that the US/NATO does not take Russian nuclear doctrine seriously, does not believe Russian red lines exist and even that acknowledging Russian red lines is in some way giving in to terrorist demands, and perhaps even that the US/NATO believes that they can win a nuclear war.
It should be noted that in almost all US war games simulating a war with a major power like China or Russia, it almost immediately devolves into the US launching a nuclear first strike. These people are insane.