MOSCOW: Vladimir Putin’s hypersonic missile carried a simple message to the West over Ukraine: back off, and if you don’t, Russia reserves the right to hit US and British military facilities.
Russia fired a new intermediate-range hypersonic ballistic missile known as “Oreshnik”, or Hazel Tree, at Ukraine on Thursday in what Putin said was a direct response to strikes on Russia by Ukrainian forces with US and British missiles.
In a special statement from the Kremlin just after 8 pm in Moscow that day, the Russian president said the war was escalating towards a global conflict, though he avoided any nuclear rhetoric.
Putin has also refrained, so far, from actually striking the West, a step that could lead to a direct confrontation between Russia and the NATO alliance a confrontation that US President Joe Biden said in March 2022 would be World War III.
In his statement, the Kremlin chief gave the West notice that Russia reserved the right to strike at the military installations of countries that let Ukraine use their missiles to hit Russia – so far only the United States and Britain.
“Putin is saying to the West stop – halt – back off,” Sergei Markov, a former Kremlin adviser, told international media. “The signal Putin is sending to the world is that we consider these strikes as the direct entry of the United States and Britain into a war against Russia,” he said. “But we are not responding with all our might right now because these strikes against Russia will not change the outcome of the war.” A Russian source who spoke on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the situation said Putin had hinted that he wanted to steer clear of escalation, though the odds of Russia using nuclear weapons remained pretty high.