By now, we ought to be used to it: since February 24 of this year, every major speech by Putin has been more threatening and deceitful, not to say bizarre, than the previous one. But even in this array, today’s nationally televised remarks, in which he announced “partial mobilization,” stand out.  

Populating virtually every sentence, the lies and non-sequiturs have reached the level of fantasy bordering on bizarre. In Ukraine, Russia is battling not just a neo-Nazi regime (led, we may recall, by a Jewish president), but an “occupational” one. Since the end of the Cold War, the West has promoted “total Russophobia,” assisted militant Islamists in the Caucasus, and moved the “attack structures” of NATO toward Russian borders. After cultivating hatred of Russia in Ukraine, the West pushed Ukraine toward war with Russia and then started such a war in 2014. 

Having “broken up” the Soviet Union, “some” Western elites declared their aim of splintering Russia into a bunch of small states at war with one another. These same “elites” openly talk about using every means to defeat Russia on the battlefield in order later to deprive it of political, economic, cultural, and “any other kind of sovereignty” and “completely plunder” it.

There are two reasons for the West’s centrality in Putin’s speech. One is domestic: how else can he explain the deeply embarrassing inability of the valiant Russian army to defeat Ukrainian neo–Nazis, except for the fact that Russia is fighting the “collective West,” as he put it. In addition to the “bands of foreign mercenaries,” on the side of the “Kyiv regime” are detachments trained up to NATO standards and under the “de facto” command of Western advisors.  

The other reason for the West’s prominence in his narrative is more troubling: blackmailing it into forcing Ukraine to stop the recovery of its occupied lands. Along with many other Soviet political traditions he adopted, Putin has taken to accusing the West of what the Kremlin itself contemplates. (For instance, the concept of the infamous “hybrid warfare” was first outlined by the Chief of General Staff Valery Gerasimov as the West’s strategy). 

According to Putin, not only do “Washington, London, and Brussels” push Kyiv toward “transferring” its operations to Russian territory, they talk about the “possibility and acceptability” of using nuclear weapons against Russia. His answer to those who “attempt to blackmail Russia with nuclear weapons” is that Russia also has all kinds of “means of mass destruction,” some even more advanced than those of NATO. Should the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Russia be threatened, he will “unconditionally” use these weapons to protect “our people.” 

Earlier in the speech, Putin called Crimea Russian territory—as the Luhansk and Donetsk regions of Ukraine will be in roughly a week after the Potemkin “referendum” he also announced in his speech. These “people,” then, are—or soon will be—“ours.”  

Lurking behind Putin’s rhetoric is Russia’s Military Doctrine, which he signed on Christmas Day, 2014. Russia “reserves the right,” it reads, to use nuclear weapons in a conventional conflict when the “very existence of the state” is in danger. And it would be Putin, and Putin alone, who would determine the degree of danger to his state. 

“I’m not bluffing,” he added. Calling—or not calling—his bluff might be next on the West’s agenda. 

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