Putin fires governor of Siberia

According to the Interfax agency, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Thursday that Russia sees itself as threatened by Ukraine’s potential NATO membership. Because otherwise it poses a serious, significant threat to our country, to its security.Peskov said. Stoltenberg visited Kiev on Thursday for the first time since the start of the war.

At the start of the war, almost 14 months ago, on February 24, 2022, Russia also announced its intention to demilitarize Ukraine. The West is supplying arms and ammunition to the country against a Russian invasion. Russia has accused NATO countries of allowing themselves to be dragged deeper and deeper into the war. The Russian leadership has long presented the war as a global conflict with the West – and thus is trying to recruit men for front-line deployment.

Kremlin spokesman Peskov also commented on Kiev’s recent accusations that President Vladimir Putin is using a double. These are “pretty weird” statements. In particular, this time it was about Putin’s visit to the occupied territories of Cherson and Luhansk regions in the past few days. “He is not the real Putin,” Oleksiy Danilov, secretary of Ukraine’s National Security Council, said on Wednesday. Putin saw in Cherson “an ordinary double, of which there are many, well known”.

However, there is no evidence that Putin’s double actually exists in official appointments. Indeed, Putin once said he had been advised in the past to use doubles in official appointments for security reasons. “The idea came up, but I didn’t use twins,” he said.

In January, the Kremlin dismissed suspicions expressed by Kiev about Putin’s presence. For Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Peskov said at the time that the presence of Putin and Russia was a psychological issue. The sooner Kiev realizes that both Russia and Putin are here to stay, the better for Ukraine. (sda/dpa)