Vladimir Putin is staying away from the Crocus concert hall where the terrorist act took place last Friday which left at least 140 people dead, a toll destined to rise given the high number of missing. Put in difficulty by the attack that his services were unable to anticipate, the Russian president did not want to visit the site of the massacre claimed by ISIS but attributed, with varying degrees of uncertainty, to a Ukrainian lead not supported by anything and even denied by his ally Aleksandr Lukashenko, who specified that the fleeing attackers were headed towards Belarus and not towards Ukraine.
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For a crowd, Putin therefore chose Torzhok, in the Tver region, in the north-west of the country, between Moscow and St. Petersburg. At the Torzhok air base, Putin once again took on the role of commander in chief, dismissing as “total absurdity” the possibility that Russia would invade Europe, an idea that arises, he added, “from a collapsing economy and the deterioration of standard of living”. The Russian President added that Moscow’s forces will consider the F-16s as “legitimate targets” “if they take off from air bases in third countries”, namely Ukraine, and if they are used against Russian forces. And this applies wherever the warplanes that the West is supplying to Ukraine are located, Putin specified in response to those who explicitly asked him whether the F-16s would also be hit at NATO bases, if they are used there ( however, a non-existent possibility, ed.). Training of Ukrainian pilots for F-16s has already begun in Denmark.
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The idea of a possible Russian invasion of Europe is therefore, for Putin, “a total absurdity whose aim is only to intimidate people into paying more money”. «It’s not about propaganda, but about what is really happening. They have to justify themselves, so they intimidate people with a potential Russian threat as they try to expand their dictatorship to the entire world.” Meanwhile, Pyongyang announced today, through the official KCNA news agency, that the director of the Russian foreign intelligence services (SVR) Sergei Naryshkin was in North Korea at the beginning of the week, to meet with the minister for North Korean State Security, Ri Chang Dae, with whom he discussed “strengthening cooperation to address increasing espionage activities and plots by hostile forces.”
