No Picture
News Briefs

Putin warns West of nuclear war risk over Ukraine troop deployment

February 29, 2024 Catholic News Agency 2
In this pool photograph distributed by Russian state agency Sputnik, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin delivers his annual state of the nation address at the Gostiny Dvor conference center in central Moscow on Feb. 29, 2024. / Credit: GAVRIIL GRIGOROV/POOL/AFP via Getty Images

CNA Staff, Feb 29, 2024 / 16:05 pm (CNA).

Russian President Vladimir Putin in a speech on Thursday cautioned that any Western military intervention in support of Ukraine could potentially lead to nuclear conflict.

“[The West] must understand that we also have weapons that can hit targets on their territory,” Putin, who is widely expected to hold onto power in an upcoming election, said in a Feb. 29 speech to Russia’s Federal Assembly. 

Warning of “tragic consequences” if NATO forces were ever deployed to Ukraine, Putin continued, as reported by the Washington Post: “All this really threatens a conflict with the use of nuclear weapons and the destruction of civilization. Don’t they get that? … [Russia’s] strategic nuclear forces are in a state of full readiness.”

Putin’s speech came two days after French President Emmanuel Macron suggested that the deployment of foreign forces to Ukraine remained an option.

“We will do everything needed so Russia cannot win the war,” Macron said at a news conference. He said there is no consensus to “send in” troops on the ground, but said “nothing can be ruled out.”

In response to Macron’s remarks, the Vatican’s secretary of state, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, said the idea that Europe could send ground troops to Ukraine opens a “frightening scenario” that could “bring about the escalation that we have always tried to avoid from the beginning.”

“It’s a scenario that I wouldn’t call apocalyptic because perhaps that’s an exaggerated word at this moment, but certainly it’s fearsome,” Parolin said Feb. 27, as reported by Vatican News.

The cardinal, who has called for peace in Ukraine but also previously warned of the dangers of escalation, lamented that “no prospect of a solution on the horizon, be it military or negotiated.”

“It would be ideal to really find a way to get the two sides to start talking and dialoguing,” Parolin added to Vatican News. “I believe that if we talk, a solution will be found.” 

Pope Francis has spoken before of the danger of the possibility of a nuclear war “that will extinguish us.” The pope’s words came shortly after the start of the war in Ukraine, at the start of which Putin ordered Russian nuclear forces to be put on high alert, raising fears of the possibility of a nuclear war.

[…]

The Dispatch

Squandering moral capital

January 23, 2019 George Weigel 5

The morality of tyrannicide is not much discussed in today’s kinder, gentler Catholic Church. Yet that difficult subject once engaged some of Catholicism’s finest minds, including Thomas Aquinas and Francisco Suárez, and it was passionately […]

The Dispatch

The cooler Cold War

July 19, 2017 George Weigel 12

The claim that “the Cold War is over” and that the West needs a “new paradigm” for relations with Russia has become an antiphon in some conservative political circles – not least conservative Christian circles. […]

The Dispatch

McCarthyism, Then and Now

June 15, 2017 Jerry Salyer 9

Before calling the reader’s attention to a year-old Claremont Review of Books article which compares Donald Trump to Joseph McCarthy, I should first make clear that I do not regard this comparison to be such […]