In a speech Friday, Russian President Vladimir Putin warned there is a "serious danger" of NATO countries continuing to supply arms to Ukraine, according to CNN.
"NATO, of course, is being drawn into the war in Ukraine; what are we talking here?" Putin asked while addressing a crowd of foreign dignitaries at the International Economic Forum in St. Petersburg, Russia. "The supplies of heavy military weaponry to Ukraine are ongoing; they are now looking into giving Ukraine the jets."
If Kyiv receives F-16s — on which Ukrainian pilots are reportedly already being trained — and stations them at bases outside Ukraine, Putin added, "we will need to look at how and where we can hit those assets used in combat operations against us. This is a serious danger of further dragging NATO into this armed conflict."
When asked during the forum what his stance was on the deployment of nuclear weapons, Putin said, "We have the opportunity. Everyone expects us to start pushing this [nuclear] button. But we have no need to. That is reason number one; we have no reason to act like this. Because our adversary is failing at the frontlines and understanding that they have a low chance of succeeding, they provoke us to retaliate — in the hope that they can point a finger at us and then say, 'Look at how evil they are.'"
The Russian president added that Moscow would not engage in any nuclear disarmament discussions with the collective West, given that reducing the country's nuclear stockpile would leave it vulnerable.
"Nuclear weapons are created to ensure our security in its most broad sense and the very existence of the Russian state. But we, firstly, do not have such a need, and secondly, the very fact of discussing this topic already lowers the threshold for the use of [nuclear] weaponry," he said.
"Also, we have more weapons like this than the NATO countries. They know it and they keep driving towards negotiation on reduction."
On Saturday, CNN reported that a source close to the Biden administration told the cable news outlet that President Joe Biden would be willing to drop the Membership Action Plan for Ukraine, which was described in a 2008 agreement as "the next step for Ukraine ... on their direct way to [NATO] membership."
In 2008, Biden's CIA director, William J. Burns, then the American envoy to Moscow, warned Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in a letter that "Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all redlines for the Russian elite (not just Putin). In more than two and a half years of conversations with key Russian players, from knuckle-draggers in the dark recesses of the Kremlin to Putin's sharpest liberal critics, I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests."
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