According to reports released tonight, Britain’s top army general has urged his troops to prepare to fight and defeat Putin’s armies in a European land war.
As Russia’s invasion of Ukraine threatens global security, General Sir Patrick Sanders, who gained overall command of the British Army last week, reminded soldiers that “we are the generation that must prepare the Army to fight in Europe once again.”
In a tub-thumping message to British troops, he wrote: ‘I am the first Chief of the General Staff since 1941 to take command of the Army in the shadow of a land war in Europe involving a continental power… The scale of the enduring threat from Russia shows we’ve entered a new era of insecurity.
‘It is my singular duty to make our Army as lethal and effective as it can be. The time is now and the opportunity is ours to seize.’
It comes as Putin menaces NATO countries and this week taunted former Soviet states in Europe by declaring: ‘They are part of historic Russia’.
Putin made the comments in response to a dramatic statement by Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, who sensationally declared he did not recognise the self-proclaimed people’s republics of Donetsk and Luhansk in eastern Ukraine.
Tokayev, sat metres away from the brooding Russian despot at the St Petersburg Economic Forum (SPIEF) yesterday, described the DPR and LPR as ‘quasi-state territories’.
‘We don’t recognise Taiwan, Kosovo, South Ossetia or Abkhazia… we apply this principle to the quasi-state territories, which in our view, are the Luhansk and Donetsk people’s republics’, the Kazakh President said in a daring defiance of Putin’s war in eastern Ukraine.
The Russian President sat quietly, considering Tokayev’s comments, before appearing to deliver a calm but quietly menacing warning.
‘What is the Soviet Union?’ Putin asked rhetorically. ‘This is historic Russia.’
He continued to portray Kazakhstan as a pro-Russian country, but immediately added, ‘The same thing could have happened with Ukraine, but they wouldn’t be our allies.’
According to The Telegraph, Maximilian Hess, a fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, Putin’s retort to Tokayev was a ‘clear threat,’ and argued that Tokayev was reliant on Russian support following widespread riots in Kazakhstan in January, which were only put down with the help of Russian paratroopers operating under the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), an eastern security bloc similar to NATO.
Putin went on to accuse the US of ‘playing God’ and treating countries like ‘colonies’ in a lengthy speech at the SPIEF conference, dismissing the impact of Western sanctions on Russia’s economy.
Putin, 69, cautioned that ‘nothing will be as it used to be’ as he made his talk, which was delayed by 90 minutes due to a cyber attack.
Putin offered a thinly veiled threat to oligarchs considering leaving his regime when he finally took the stage.
‘It’s safer in your own house,’ he said. ‘Those who didn’t want to listen to this have lost millions abroad.’
He went on to announce that Western allies ‘think they have won’ and said Moscow’s war in Ukraine had become a ‘lifesaver for the West to blame all the problems on Russia.’
He went on to say that the US sees itself as “God’s emissary on Earth,” and that Western sanctions were based on the mistaken assumption that Russia had economic sovereignty.
Moving on to his so-called ‘special military operation,’ Putin stated that the main goal of the invasion was to defend ‘our’ people in eastern Ukraine’s mostly Russian-speaking Donbas region.
Putin claimed that Russian soldiers fighting in the Donbas were also defending Russia’s ‘rights to secure development.’
‘The West has fundamentally refused to fulfil its earlier obligations, it turned out to be simply impossible to reach any new agreements with it,’ Putin said.
‘In the current situation, against a backdrop of increasing risks for us and threats, Russia’s decision to conduct a special military operation was forced – difficult, of course, but forced and necessary.’