Nikolay Patrushev, a Senior Aide to Russian President Vladimir Putin, who chairs Russia’s Maritime Board, took notice of NATO’s provocative military exercises on Russia’s border. He told TASS: “For a second consecutive year, NATO is conducting exercises at our borders at a scale unseen in decades. They are training for conducting a broad offensive from Vilnius to Odessa, seizing [the Russian exclave] Kaliningrad Region, imposing a naval blockade in the Baltic and the Black Seas, and executing preventive strikes on the staging locations of Russian nuclear deterrence forces.”
He did not sugarcoat the obvious lesson drawn by Russia from such explicit exercises. Patrushev told TASS that some European NATO members are risking nuclear war by escalating military tensions with Russia: “In a desperate attempt to stop global changes, Brussels, Berlin, Paris and a number of other European capitals have once again resorted to the shameful policy of coddling with neo-Nazis, aiming their military potential against Russia and getting delirious about scenarios of a nuclear apocalypse.” He found Western politicians unwilling to deal with the decline of their system.
