Putin warns of dangerous moment, says Kaliningrad attack would put all weapons on the agenda

Vladimir Putin said on Thursday October 1 that the world was “living through a dangerous moment” and warned the West not to escalate the standoff over Ukraine by threatening Kaliningrad, the heavily militarised Russian exclave wedged between Poland and Lithuania.

“If it comes to a direct attack on the Russian Federation — in this case, we are referring to Kaliningrad, and perhaps other territories as well — the question of the Russian Federation deploying all the weapons at our country’s disposal will, of course, inevitably and immediately be on the agenda,” Putin told the Valdai Forum of international Russia experts in Moscow. “This is inevitable.”

Putin personally confirmed a Russian diplomatic note that NATO said it received this week, warning the alliance Moscow would be ready to resort to nuclear weapons if NATO attempted to cut off the Baltic exclave. “Everything is written correctly,” he said of the note, which says Russia will use “all means” if the region faces a direct attack.

He insisted Russia had no plans to attack any European country — “neither in 2029, nor 2030, nor 2050” — and said the warning was “not intimidation, it’s a response to an attempt to intimidate us”. But he added that NATO was “an enemy twice our size” against which Russia would use its “competitive advantages”, claiming no other country possessed the kind of weapons Russia had today.

Putin also warned that escalating retaliation could lead to “a fatal point of no return”, and conceded for the first time that Ukrainian strikes on Russian oil refineries had cost Russia 1 percent of its GDP. He said he was ready for a trilateral meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping and US President Donald Trump if a proper agenda was worked out first.

NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte responded that the alliance was defensive and that nuclear threats were “not helpful”. Moscow has presented the Kaliningrad issue as an urgent concern after what it calls provocative NATO statements about a possible blockade of the exclave.