Vladimir Putin’s menacing televised address Wednesday was much more than a bid to change the course of his faltering war against Ukraine. It attempted to invert a war of aggression against a neighbor into one of defense of a threatened "motherland,” a theme that resonates with Russians steeped in patriotic history.
Putin, Russia’s president, aimed at nothing less than altering the meaning of the war for his country, raising the stakes for the entire world. He warned the West in unmistakable terms — "this is not a bluff” — that the attempt to weaken or defeat Russia could provoke nuclear cataclysm.
Rattling his nuclear saber, accusing the West of seeking to "destroy” his country and ordering the call-up of 300,000 military reservists, Putin implicitly conceded that the war he started Feb. 24 has not gone as he wished. He painted the Ukrainians as mere pawns of the "military machine of the collective West.”
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