Russian President Vladimir Putin held a three-hour press conference on June 5 with the international media gathered for the opening of the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF), in which he responded to last week’s announcement by the United States and other NATO countries that they would allow Ukraine to start using long-range NATO weapons, including the ATACMS, to strike inside the borders of Russia.
“If it is considered possible to supply such weapons to the war zone to strike our territory … why shouldn’t we supply similar weapons to those regions of the world, where they will be used against sensitive sites of these countries? We can respond asymmetrically,” Putin warned. “This is a recipe for very serious problems,” he added.
Serious problems indeed—such as crossing the tripwire for nuclear war between the United States and Russia. As former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter put it simply on June 4 on Judge Andrew Napolitano’s “Judging Freedom” show: “We are one ATACMS launch away from everybody dying. The Russians aren’t playing games here.”
Schiller Institute founder Helga Zepp-LaRouche concurred strongly with Ritter in her Weekly Webcast June 5, 2024: “I can only say that the judgment of Scott Ritter is that once they start to use the ATACMS missiles, which has a much longer-range and could actually reach deep into Russian territory, or if German Chancellor Scholz capitulates again, which he is doing, and allows the Taurus cruise missiles to be deployed [to Ukraine], this could lead to the absolute destruction even of Moscow, the Kremlin, and it would mean a guaranteed World War III. And we are absolutely sitting on that powder keg.
“Therefore, one ATACMS away from Armageddon is exactly where we are. And we have to really get the population mobilized,” Zepp-LaRouche insisted.
Over the next three days, the SPIEF meeting will be taking up some of the essential policy questions related to a solution to the existential crises facing the planet—most emphatically, how to reorganize the currently bankrupt international financial system to permit significant credit flows for high-technology infrastructure projects, which are in the interest of all nations. Such an approach is the basis for defusing war and launching cooperation between East and West, North and South.
Asked what Putin’s approach would be at the SPIEF meeting, where plans for the upcoming October summit of the BRICS will also be discussed, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov put it this way: “To promote international cooperation, encourage scientific and technological progress as well as effectively tackle the challenges we [the international community] face.” He added, accurately, that “a growing part of the international community is in favor of building a just and democratic system of international relations based on the principles of genuine equality, consideration for each other’s legitimate interests, and respect for the cultural and civilizational diversity of nations.”
Choose to become an actor on the stage of history today, and arm yourself with an understanding of the battlefield which you’re on. Join Schiller Institute founder Helga Zepp-LaRouche this Friday, June 7, at 11 a.m. ET, for the International Peace Coalition’s 53rd consecutive weekly meeting, with guests Theodore Postol, Professor Emeritus of Science, Technology and National Security at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; former CIA analyst and Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) co-founder Ray McGovern; and others.
