There are indications that Russia is significantly hardening its policy posture on a number of strategic fronts, as NATO’s expansion enters a new phase with the accession of Finland and Sweden to that organization.
• Nikolai Patrushev, the head of Russia’s Security Council, yesterday stated that Moscow had to “use this preventive measure [in Ukraine], because the level of threats to national security, disregard to our country’s interest has entered a new level, which threatened Russia’s very statehood and existence.” (Recall Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Grushko’s May 10 summary of the conditions under which Russian military doctrine states that Russia “is allowed to use nuclear weapons,” which includes “if the country faces an existential threat through the use of conventional weapons.") Patrushev also said that “the neoliberalism of the collective West is transforming before our eyes into the ideology of neoliberal fascism, aimed primarily at the eradication of the Russian world.”
• Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov stated yesterday: “It is true that we keep referring to them [Western states] mildly as unfriendly states, but I should say that they are hostile states, because what they are doing is war.”
• The Foreign Ministry announced that it was withdrawing from the Council of the Baltic Sea States, because the situation in that body is “degrading.” “We consider further presence of our country in the council pointless and counterproductive. Russia will not participate in turning the organization in another platform for sabotage activities and ‘Western vanity,’” the Ministry stated. Simultaneously, the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation, comprised of the State Duma and the Federation Council, decided to withdraw from the Baltic Sea Parliamentary Conference. Duma Committees are now studying Russian withdrawal from the World Health Organization (WHO) and World Trade Organization (WTO), according to Pyotr Tolstoy, the vice speaker of the parliament.
• Deputy Foreign Minister Andrey Rudenko reported that there are no negotiations going on with Ukraine at all. “The talks are not continuing. Ukraine has in fact quit the process of negotiations.”
