Kremlin spokesman yesterday Dmitry Peskov joined Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov, and RIAC President Dmitry Trenin in issuing significant Russian policy statements this week—as if on a mission to make sure the world is aware of Russia’s thinking at this critical strategic juncture. Peskov spoke to the Swiss daily Weltwoche on July 7, with excerpts reported by Sputnik.
“Russia is too big and too responsible a country to be an initiator of a third world war,” Peskov said. “The United States knows the possible consequences of that war as well. Plus, we have relatively good dialogue. We are not good in our bilateral relations, because they’re stuck; they’re on a zero level. But, despite that, we are clever enough to talk to each other. We are too big and too powerful in terms of mutual deterrence to be at war.”
Peskov addressed the Europe situation: “Europe, all of a sudden, understood that they are not any more guaranteed from the point of view of security by the United States, and that they have to add a military, a military capacity to the EU economic bloc. And now we are witnessing a transformation of EU to an economic and military bloc. This is a brand new process on European soil, and of course we are monitoring it very closely.”
He ripped into Europe’s overt support for Ukraine, and the consequences it will have: “Lots of European countries found themselves directly or indirectly involved in this war. They are sending weapons, they are supplying ammunition to the Kiev regime, they are supplying the Kiev regime with their military advisors, they are supplying the Kiev regime with satellite surveillance results—they actually [put] their satellites at the total disposal of the Kiev regime. They target the weapons, Ukrainian weapons, by their satellites. They are using their artificial intelligence, AI, in order to facilitate the military activities of the Kiev regime,” he said, calling this a direct intervention in the hostilities.
