Russia Ramps Up Its Rhetoric, Says ‘Cold’ War is Over

The desperation of the Russian army is growing legendary at this point in the Ukraine war.  The Kremlin tells them to grind on and so they do, even as they’re being handed rusty AK-47s and rolling around in tanks built while Adolf Hitler was still alive.

And as this downward spiral of despair creeps back to Red Square and the Kremlin that towers above it, Vladimir Putin and his cronies are growing ever more belligerent, threatening the entire planet with nuclear Armageddon every time an American C-130 lands anywhere east of Rammstein AFB.

The latest escalation in verbiage seems to suggest that war has been declared one the west.

The United States is “playing with fire” and engaged in a hot “hybrid war” with Russia, having already graduated from the Cold War stage, a Russian government minister has claimed, incredibly even going so far as to blame the U.S. for rising nuclear tensions.

The new Cold War is already over, a Kremlin spokesman has said, apparently looking past Russia’s own role in invading Ukraine and accusing the United States of “playing with fire” by pushing the world towards nuclear war that he insists Russians wish to avoid.

Russia has been inching ever closer to calamity of late.

The comments come just hours after Russia announced it had deployed nuclear-capable missiles to the borders of NATO in Belarus, and refitted Belarussian jets with the equipment to carry and drop nuclear bombs. Moscow made a tacit accusation that the United States was to blame for this, saying Russia was doing no more than America already did, in stationing nuclear weapons in the territory of European allies.

The Kremlin’s message was clear:

Speaking Wednesday, Russia’s deputy foreign minister Sergey Ryabkov made the ‘hot war’ comments and said, per a release on his discussion from a government-controlled news and propaganda service: “I think we have already passed this period [of Cold War]. Now we are in the phase of a hot conflict with the United States. We are witnessing the direct involvement of that country in a hybrid war with Russia on various fronts”.

While blame is generally laid at Russia’s door for invading Ukraine, the minister insisted it was in fact the U.S. that was pushing the world towards nuclear war and that Russia was the peaceful party trying to avoid such an exchange. Expressing this, Ryabkov postulated: “…there can be no winners in a nuclear war and that it must not be unleashed.

“But the way our American opponents are recklessly, provocatively, and in many respects absolutely carelessly moving up the escalation ladder, the way they are blinded by their absolutely absurd certainty about their ability to inflict a strategic defeat on Russia makes one doubt their mental faculties and their common sense.”

And then:

The U.S. is “playing with fire” and was risking making “fatal mistakes”, Ryabkov said, saying the Russian Federation “will be ready to take all measures and to use all means at our disposal” if there were attempts to encroach on their sovereignty.

Of course, after witnessing the abject humiliation of the Russian army in Ukraine, it becomes a little difficult to take these threats too seriously.