2024-09-17 22:02:04
Vladimir Putin is once again threatening the West with war. However, another retaliatory measure could be more likely than an armed conflict against NATO.
Despite international sanctions because of the war in Ukraine, Western countries continue to rely on raw materials from Russia. However, ruler Vladimir Putin is now considering restricting the export of certain metals if the USA and Great Britain grant Ukraine permission to use long-range weapons to attack Russian territory. This is reported by the Reuters news agency, citing the Kremlin.
The raw materials affected by a possible export ban include uranium, titanium and nickel. Unlike oil, these raw materials have not yet been sanctioned despite Russia’s invasion of Ukraine – because many countries in the West depend on them.
The state-owned company Rosatom, which is responsible for the mining of uranium, is one of the biggest supporters of the Kremlin and its war against Ukraine. In 2022 alone, EU countries paid around 720 million euros for Russian nuclear products and uranium – money that flows directly into Putin’s war chest.
Putin also threatened NATO on Thursday with a military retaliatory strike if Ukraine was given permission to use Western long-range weapons. These threats have been repeated over the past two and a half years. The autocrat is also reportedly not ruling out a nuclear war if the West “forces him to escalate” – that is the Kremlin’s interpretation.
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The Kremlin’s sabre-rattling has now become a habit: most experts believe that Moscow’s war threats are a means of psychological warfare. The aim is to intimidate the population in the West and create a mood that serves pro-Russian interests.
This is especially true in Germany, where parties such as the AfD and the BSW have long since adopted the argumentation patterns from Moscow. And large parts of the peace movement are still receptive to propaganda from the Kremlin.
According to David R. Shedd, these “mind games” of the Kremlin are intended to contribute to the uncertainty of Western governments, wrote the former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, a US military intelligence agency, in an article for the specialist magazine “Foreign Policy”. And what’s more, they are intended to prevent them from expanding their military support for Ukraine and supplying new types of weapons.
British Prime Minister Starmer: “We are not looking for conflict with Russia”
Late Thursday evening, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer was actually quoted as announcing that his country was not interested in an escalation with Russia.
“Ukraine has a right to self-defence,” said Starmer, a right that Britain fully supports and that it is offering training opportunities in this context. “But we are not looking for a conflict with Russia, that is not our intention in the slightest,” stressed the British Prime Minister, who is currently in Washington for talks.
“Putin knows that there is no better way to push the West’s buttons than with nuclear threats,” said intelligence expert Shedd. “Putin is counting on the fear of nuclear escalation to paralyze Ukraine’s supporters in Washington, Berlin and elsewhere. The result is a policy of appeasement, because they fear pushing Putin too far into a corner.”
However, other measures are more likely than an expansion of the war to NATO countries, which experts say Putin cannot afford at the moment. According to government spokesman Dmitri Peskov, Russia could react by introducing certain export restrictions on important metals and radioactive material.
Russia is an important supplier of uranium, titanium and nickel worldwide. The Netherlands, among others, is a major buyer of these raw materials, which play an important role in metal processing and material production. But other European countries also import important Russian goods – such as uranium pellets and fuel rods. These are essential for the operators of European nuclear power plants, for example.
In this respect, an export ban on these products would be a much better lever for Putin to make the West compliant. It would be a special kind of nuclear war, one that would be fought not on the battlefield but on the economic level.