Tuesday, July 16, 2024

Moscow’s Latest ‘Wake-Up Call’ For U.S./NATO: 'Almost all European capitals will be under threat if our missiles are stationed in Kaliningrad'


Russia Threatens Attacks Against Europe After Assassination Attempt On Trump
Stefan J. Bos



The Kremlin’s vital mouthpiece has tested America’s attention span by threatening to strike the European capitals of U.S. allies shortly after ex-President Donald J. Trump survived an assassination attempt over the weekend.

With much of the United States now focused on its internal security services following the first shooting of a presidential candidate in decades, Russia’s state-run Rossiya 1 TV channel showed off Moscow’s nuclear capabilities late Sunday.

“Almost all European capitals will be under threat if our missiles are stationed in Kaliningrad: Berlin, Warsaw, all the Baltic states, Paris, Bucharest, Prague, and of course, the American bases in Germany,” TV host and State Duma lawmaker Yevgeny Popov said in remarks analyzed by Worthy News on Monday.

“Special attention to Britain, our traditional enemy,” the TV host warned. “Britain is in the most vulnerable position. In principle, three missiles are enough to end this civilization.”

The statement, believed to have been coordinated with Moscow, was expected to increase pressure on the physically and cognitively declining U.S. President Joe Biden.

It also underscored concerns that Russia and allies such as China are searching for weaknesses in the United States under Biden, who, at 81, is America’s oldest commander-in-chief on record.

Ties between Washington and Moscow have become increasingly strained over Russian President Vladimir Putin’s decision to launch a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

Beijing has also come under Western pressure over its perceived support for Russia’s war effort, though China claims it has a peace plan to end the armed conflict.

Though Russian officials on Russia’s state TV called for strikes on U.S. soil before, Sunday’s remarks appeared more detailed on how to punish the U.S.-led NATO military alliance over aid and weapons provided to Kyiv.

Popov spoke after the U.S. and Germany said at NATO’s 75th-anniversary summit in Washington, D.C., last week that the U.S. will, in 2026, deploy longer-range missiles in Germany.

“It’s not hard to guess the geography of the response if the White House’s short press release becomes a reality,” Popov warned, showing a map of Europe on screen with possible Russian targets.

Moscow’s latest ‘wake-up call’ for Biden came after the Kremlin warned against the deployment of U.S. missiles in Germany.

“We have enough capacity to contain these missiles, but the potential victims are the capitals of these countries,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told the All-Russia State Television and Radio Broadcasting Company (VGTRK) on Saturday.

In a joint statement with Germany, the White House said the U.S. will begin “episodic deployments of the long-range fires capabilities of its Multi-Domain Task Force in Germany in 2026, as part of planning for enduring stationing of these capabilities in the future.”

They warned that when “fully developed, these conventional long-ranged fire units will include SM-6, Tomahawk, and developmental hypersonic weapons, which have significantly longer range than current land-based fires in Europe,” Worthy News reported earlier.

The U.S. and Germany said exercising these “advanced capabilities” will “demonstrate the United States’ commitment to NATO and its contributions to European integrated deterrence.”

However, with Moscow now threatening to place (more) nuclear-capable missiles in Kaliningrad, Europe was getting closer to an East-West nuclear confrontation, with key treaties supposed to end the Cold War all but buried under an avalanche of war rhetoric.

Kaliningrad is a strategic Russian exclave between Lithuania and Poland and the only ice-free Russian port on the Baltic Sea, making much of Europe more vulnerable.

The prime minister of Hungary, which has the rotating European Union presidency, has urged peace talks to end the war in Ukraine that is believed to have claimed hundreds of thousands of lives and now threatens to engulf an entire continent.

Viktor Orbán shares Trump’s views that there is no military solution for ending Europe’s largest military conflict since the Second World War.



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