The date mattered as much as the words. On the morning of 24 February, the fourth anniversary of the full-scale invasion, Kremlin-aligned Russian agencies carried a Foreign Intelligence Service claim that Britain and France were preparing to hand Kyiv a nuclear weapon, disguised as Ukraine’s own development. Presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov called the claim “potentially extremely dangerous” and said it would be “taken into account during negotiations”. Within hours, the threats had escalated again.
Deputy Security Council chairman Dmitry Medvedev went furthest. Under such a scenario, he said, Russia would have to use “any weapons, including non-strategic nuclear weapons, against targets in Ukraine”. Then came the wider line: “And, if necessary, against the supplier countries, which would become participants in a nuclear conflict with Russia”. It is the same official who has made such threats a recurring genre, and the anniversary gave the genre its stage.
The pattern has deep institutional roots, and no figure illustrates them better than Nikolai Patrushev, secretary of the Security Council. In a February 21 [2022] gathering in St Catherine’s Hall, with Putin listening attentively, it was Patrushev who told Russia’s political and military elite: “Their concrete goal is to destroy the Russian Federation”. Born in June 1951, a few months before Putin, into a Leningrad military family that had lived through the Nazi blockade, he has been described as never more than a heartbeat away from the leader across two decades.
His worldview was formed in the KGB’s Leningrad offices, where his conviction formed that the main adversary, the glavniy protivnik, simply never went away. In an earlier speech he had already warned that Washington would be held to account for all of Russia’s troubles. Oleg Kalugin, the former KGB general who once supervised him, put it personally: “I knew him really well for a long time. He was my assistant in Leningrad”. The engineering diploma Patrushev took from the Leningrad Shipbuilding Institute is one he shares with the current chiefs of the FSB and the SVR, a reminder of how narrow the circle is.
For ordinary families far from Kyiv, the significance is cumulative rather than singular: nuclear language has moved from taboo to routine in official Russian channels, voiced by more than one senior figure at once. The words were cheap to say and impossible to unsay, and each anniversary now arrives with its own escalation vocabulary attached.
Sources
- The Second Most Powerful Man In Russia – New Lines Magazine
- Russia's Medvedev threatens Europe with nuclear attacks again | Ukrainska Pravda
