Ivor Bennett<\/a>, Moscow correspondent<\/p>\nMoscow’s accusation came out of nowhere, that Britain and France want to supply Ukraine with the material to make a nuclear weapon.\u00a0<\/p>\n
There was no evidence presented to back it up. Just a statement of fact from Russia’s foreign intelligence service, the SVR.<\/p>\n
The unsubstantiated claim was then repeated by Vladimir Putin this afternoon, in a speech to Russia’s security service, the FSB.<\/p>\n
“The enemy isn’t shying away from any other means [of attack],” he warned.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“The media is probably already reporting their attempts – or intentions – to even use some kind of nuclear component. They probably understand how this could end.”\u00a0<\/p>\n
It’s no coincidence that Moscow is making these claims on the fourth anniversary of its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The so-called Special Military Operation wasn’t supposed to last this long, and milestones like this can draw unwanted attention to the fact things didn’t pan out as planned.\u00a0<\/p>\n
A good time, then, to accuse the West of wanting to arm Kyiv with a dirty bomb.\u00a0<\/p>\n
From the start, Vladimir Putin framed his invasion as a defensive war against Western aggression. And the longer the way has gone on, the more Moscow has leaned into that messaging, to help justify its ongoing conflict.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Today’s claims play into it – a way to reinforce the narrative that the West is the aggressor, and Russia is the victim, on the righteous path.\u00a0<\/p>\n
There’s plenty more of that in the Russian papers. Komsomolskaya Pravda, said to be Putin’s favourite newspaper, is running a piece entitled “What four years of the Special Military Operation taught us”, which contains reflections from MPs, commentators and veterans. One writes that it’s shown him that “nothing can break us or frighten us”.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Another paper, Izvestia, has a headline quoting a line from Putin’s speech on Monday, which marked Defenders of the Fatherland day. “Russia is fighting for its future, for independence, for truth and justice,” it reads.\u00a0<\/p>\n
But you only see these headlines once you open the papers. On the frontpages, there’s no mention of the war’s anniversary at all, which is perhaps the most telling thing of all.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Analysis: Moscow’s nuclear claims deflect from prolonged ‘special military operation’ By Ivor Bennett, Moscow correspondent Moscow’s accusation came…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":443716,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[59,57,58,50,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-443715","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-kingdom","tag-gb","tag-great-britain","tag-greatbritain","tag-news","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/443715","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=443715"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/443715\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/443716"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=443715"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=443715"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=443715"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}