Dmitry Medvedev has threatened the Ukrainian leadership with a massive strike should Kiev attack Crimea
Dmitry Medvedev © Ekaterina Shtukina / Sputnik
The leadership of Ukraine would meet their maker should it attack Crimea, as Russia would retaliate with a massive strike, the country’s former president has warned.
Speaking with Second World War veterans on Sunday in the city of Volgograd, Dmitry Medvedev, Russia’s president from 2008 to 2012 and currently deputy chairman of the country’s Security Council, issued a dire warning to the authorities in Kiev, who had earlier said that a strike against Crimea was on the cards.
“Some exalted bloody clowns that are periodically popping up over there with some statements, and are even trying to threaten us – I mean an attack on Crimea and so on,” should be aware that the consequences of such an action would be severe for them, the Russian official said.
According to Medvedev, “in case something like that happens, the Day of Judgement will come to them all simultaneously – a swift and hard one.”
The former president added that “it will be very difficult to hide” should Russia launch such a massive strike. He noted that despite these risks, the Ukrainian leadership is “continuing to provoke the overall situation with such statements.”
At some point the Ukrainian authorities will start to realize that Russia will accomplish all of its operational goals in Ukraine no matter what, he said, including demilitarization and denazification.
Medvedev, however, qualified his remark, by saying that the hope for such a scenario was “fairly faint because they are not acting sensibly.” He went on to claim that the government in Kiev is eager to fight Russian forces “to the last Ukrainian,” but this is likely to backfire and lead to the “collapse of the existing political regime” in the future.
The former president acknowledged that Russia itself was going through a “very difficult” period in its history, and expressed confidence, however, that the country would emerge stronger out of the current conflict.
“And we will achieve the set goals in the name of our country’s development and so as not to let our dear veterans down, who defended our motherland during the Great Patriotic War,” Medvedev concluded.
Earlier on Sunday, Russian Senator Andrey Klishas echoed the former president’s statement, saying that “threats from the Ukrainian junta to attack Crimea or the Crimean Bridge only confirm that ‘denazification’ and demilitarization must be carried out throughout the whole of Ukraine.”
Meanwhile, MP Mikhail Sheremet, who represents the peninsula in the Russian parliament, threatened Ukraine with a retaliation so harsh that the country would never be able to recover from it.
A string of warnings and threats began pouring out of Moscow after a spokesman for Ukraine’s Directorate of Intelligence at the Ministry of Defense, Vadim Skibitskiy, said on Saturday that Kiev considers the Crimean Peninsula to be a legitimate target for long-range weapons provided by the West.
“Today, the Crimean Peninsula has become a hub for the movement of all equipment and weapons that come from the Russian Federation to the south of our state,” the Ukrainian official explained.
Crimea became a Russian region back in 2014 following a referendum in which the vast majority of its residents voted in favor of rejoining Russia. This vote was preceded by the Maidan coup in Kiev, with the predominantly Russian-speaking population of the peninsula refusing to recognize the new authorities as legitimate.
Ukraine, along with the EU, the US and most other countries, consider Crimea an inalienable part of Ukrainian territory, which is temporarily occupied by Russia.
