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Putin also accused the West of instigating other conflicts.
“If there is a direct attack on the Russian Federation, in this case we are talking about Kaliningrad, but possibly some other territories, of course the question of the use by the Russian Federation of all the weapons available to our country will inevitably and immediately be on the agenda,” he said.
He accused NATO of holding naval maneuvers in the Baltic Sea, which he argued represented serious threats to Kaliningrad. If the territory came under Western blockade, he said that Russia would be ready to use all means and forces, including nuclear.
“We are not threatening anyone. We do not want to attack anyone in 2029, 2030, 2050. But if we come across an aggression, we must react. The citizens of European countries should be fully aware of this.”
He added that while he was aware of the nuclear capabilities of countries such as Britain and France, the weapons at their disposal were unmatched.
Western officials have long feared that Russia, instead of invading Kaliningrad, would try to seize Lithuanian territory by force, the relatively small distance between the exclave and its ally Belarus – known as the Suwalki Gap.
Lithuania’s prime minister told the BBC last week that his country had made evacuation plans in case Russia invaded and thousands of Nato troops were stationed there.
NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte made it clear on Wednesday that none of the alliance’s “exercises or activities” posed a threat to Moscow and that the Kremlin’s message was “absolutely uncalled for and unhelpful”.
Putin spent some time talking about the leading countries in the world that have weapons at their disposal that “can wipe out all life or at least push the earth to catastrophic consequences”, and said that, unfortunately, no one could be sure that they would never be used.
He drew the analogy of a gun sitting on a theater stage – if it was hanging there at the beginning of the show, it would surely be fired at the end.
He apparently called for rewriting the rules of war and warned of the increasing risk of artificial intelligence.
“The automation and digitization of war leads to its gamification. This leads to degradation and backsliding of humanity to barbarism,” he said.
