‘I am scared’: Russians panic as Putin sends reserves to the Ukrainian border
As world leaders line up to condemn Russia’s war in Ukraine before the United Nations General Assembly in New York, it’s hard not to wonder if Putin timed his headline-grabbing speech to steal their thunder.
Announcing the mobilization of Russian reserves, Putin said that his army was confronting “the entire military machine of the collective West” in Ukraine and needed to protect the “territorial integrity and sovereignty of Russia” from the “aggressive politics of Western elites who are doing all they can to impose their will and their pseudo-values.”
It was the West, he said, that was threatening Russia with nuclear weapons. Not the other way around.
Putin’s speech is chilling not only because of the Damoclean nuclear threat he continues to hang over us but because it is all based entirely on a bewildering, alternative narrative, stitched together from years of conspiracy theories and Kremlin-manufactured paranoia.