By Guy Faulconbridge
MOSCOW, Feb 2 (Reuters) – Dmitry Medvedev, a senior Kremlin security official, said in remarks released for publication on Monday that the world was getting very dangerous, but that Russia did not want a global conflict.
Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine triggered the biggest confrontation between the West and Moscow since the depths of the Cold War, though U.S. President Donald Trump’s envoys are trying to negotiate an end to the war with Russia and Ukraine.
Medvedev, who serves as deputy chairman of Russia’s Security Council, a kind of modern-day politburo of Russia’s most powerful officials, praised Trump and said it was encouraging that contacts had resumed with Washington.
But Medvedev, who has repeatedly hurled invective at Kyiv and Western powers while warning of the risks of an escalation of the war towards a nuclear “apocalypse”, said the West had repeatedly ignored Russian interests.
“The situation is very dangerous,” Medvedev told Reuters, TASS and the WarGonzo Russian war blogger in an interview at his residence outside Moscow.
“The pain threshold seems to be decreasing.”
“We are not interested in a global conflict. We’re not crazy,” said Medvedev, who served as Russian president from 2008 to 2012. “A global conflict cannot be ruled out.”
President Vladimir Putin remains the final voice on Russian policy, though Medvedev, now an arch-hawk, gives a sense of hardliners’ thinking within the Russian elite, according to foreign diplomats.
A cartoon hanging in the room where the interview took place showed Medvedev, a former lawyer who hails from Putin’s hometown of St Petersburg, pointing a submachine gun at European leaders.
WORLD WAS SIMPLY ‘TOO MUCH’ IN JANUARY
Putin and Trump have both mentioned the risks of escalation over Ukraine, though European diplomats say that Moscow has skillfully played the escalation card to scare Ukraine’s allies from getting too heavily involved in the war.
“They say ‘No way – these Russians are making it all up – they are sowing horror stories and they will never do anything,” Medvedev said, adding that what the Kremlin calls the “Special Military Operation” in Ukraine showed Russia would stand up for its interests.
Ukraine and its European allies cast the war, the deadliest in Europe since World War Two, as an imperial-style land grab, and say that if Russia wins in Ukraine then it will one day attack NATO. Russia dismisses such claims as nonsense.
Conflict first erupted in eastern Ukraine in 2014 after a pro-Russian president was toppled in Ukraine’s Maidan Revolution. Russia annexed Crimea and Moscow-backed separatists battled Kyiv’s armed forces in eastern Ukraine.
When asked about the flurry of global events of January in Venezuela, over Greenland and elsewhere, Medvedev said that it had all been simply “too much”.
On Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, a Russian ally, Medvedev said that if Trump had been “stolen” by a foreign power, then the United States would have clearly seen it as an act of war.
He also said Western claims of a Russian or Chinese threat to Greenland were false “horror stories” made up by Western leaders to justify their own behaviour.
(Reporting by Guy Faulconbridge; Editing by Jacqueline Wong and Michael Perry)
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