Putin’s nuclear riposte to Macron fails to impress EU diplomats

“They must grasp that we also have weapons … capable of striking targets on their territory,” he said.

Russia’s “strategic nuclear forces are on full combat alert”, Putin added. He warned of “the end of civilisation” and reeled off names of Russian ballistic missiles: Avangard, Burevestnik, Kinzhal, Sarmat, Zircon.

Putin’s words came as a direct riposte to French president Emmanuel Macron, who told press in Paris on Monday “nothing could be excluded”, when asked if Nato countries might send troops to defend Ukraine.

“We remember what happened to those who sent their contingents to the territory of our country once before,” Putin also said on Thursday, alluding to Napoleon’s failed invasion of Russia, or Hitler’s failed Operation Barbarossa in 1941.

Macron’s remarks had surprised his own allies, including Germany, Poland, and the US, who immediately ruled out Ukraine deployments.

Some in Europe thought Macron had meant greater use of Western special forces in Ukraine, which have been operating there in secret since the start of the war in 2022 anyway, according to Nato experts.

Others, such as Nicolas Tenzer, from the Paris School of International Affairs, said the Élysée was floating a bolder vision — to send Western peacekeepers to liberated parts of Ukraine to deter a new Russian offensive.

“He [Macron] said either too much [in public] or too little and he confused people [allies],” Tenzer told EUobserver.

But either way, Macron’s new rhetoric showed how far he’d changed from his pre-war “romance” that Putin could be swayed by diplomacy, Tenzer said.

“Many people in Le Quai d’Orsay [the French foreign ministry] have long believed this was naive — that any engagement with Russia is a fool’s game”, Tenzer added.

“The French military also understand this,” he said.

Meanwhile, Putin’s nuclear-sabre rattling on Thursday was “a way of … seeking to capitalise on the Western disunity following Macron’s comments,” said Callum Fraser, from the Royal United Services Institute (Rusi) think-tank in London.

It was just the latest in a series of similar threats in the past two years. Russian ex-president Dmitry Medvedev and Russian state-TV anchors do it almost daily.

Putin has also used his line on nuclear “full combat alert” before even though it meant nothing, because all nuclear powers’ arsenals stay on alert even in peacetime.

His two-hour speech contained no news about Ukraine in general.

If anything, it was more sober than some of his former orations, which spoke of a holy war against Western “satanism”.

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“Putin [on Thursday] once again referred to Russia being the victim of Western aggression, highlighted recent successes of the Russian army, domestic unity behind the war … Nothing particularly out of fashion from his previous addresses,” said Rusi’s Callum.

One EU country’s diplomat said: “This man [Putin] can’t come up with anything new”.

A second EU diplomat said: “There was a lot about the economy, social policy, education, regional policy, propaganda about how great Russia’s doing — this part was only worth laughing at”.

And the EU foreign service’s spokesman, Peter Stano, did just that.

Putin’s speech was “yet another opportunity to spread his lies … if anyone’s still listening”, Stano told press in Brussels on Wednesday.

“His whole speech can be summarised in a very short way — he’s deceiving the Russian nation, which is under an iron fist of repression that resembles Stalinist times, the [Russian] army is in a disastrous state, the economy is in tatters,” the EU spokesman added.

Navalny funeral

Putin spoke two weeks after Russia’s best-known dissident Alexei Navalny died in an Arctic jail and shortly before Russian elections on 15 March.

But he said nothing on Navalny, whose funeral in Moscow on Friday will test what freedom of assembly is left in Russia ahead of the sham vote, in which Putin’s opponents were disqualified.

Navalny’s widow, Yulia, said on Wednesday in the European Parliament in Strasbourg: “I’m not sure yet whether it [the funeral] will be peaceful … [or] … the police will arrest those who’ve come to say goodbye”.

“Putin is capable of anything … you cannot negotiate with him,” she added. “You’re not dealing with a politician, but with a bloody monster,” she said.

Callum, the Rusi Kremlinologist, said: “Putin refrained from referring to him [Navalny] by name [in Thursday’s speech], and will likely attempt to keep him out of the spotlight in the build-up to the election to limit any form of domestic unrest”.

And when EUobserver asked one of Navalny’s London-based associates, who asked not to be named, what he thought of Putin’s address, the exiled Russian activist said: “I didn’t follow it, as I don’t think it matters”.