Putin's threat: Russia plans to send long-range arms to third countries

The journalist and correspondent María Senovilla took to the microphones of ‘De cara al mundo’ to analyse the course of the war in Ukraine.

María, Putin's latest threat is to send long-range weapons to third countries to attack the West. 

That's right, Russia is threatening, I've said it clearly, to unleash a symmetrical war against the entire West. This is the response to the permission given to Ukraine by the United States, France and Germany to use long-range weapons on Russian soil, something they have been doing for a couple of days in Belgorod, the province where they are allowed to attack, which is the province that borders on Kharkov, from where Russian troops are launching this offensive against Kharkov and the Ukrainians are trying to stop it. 

They recently managed to destroy an important anti-defence missile system, S-300, which is very large and which was also doing a lot of damage to the capital, Kharkov, because it was the one that was bombing those electrical installations and those civilian infrastructures that Putin has decided to destroy there. With this American weaponry, in this case HIMARS missiles, he managed to destroy this Russian position in Belgorod. 

The Kremlin's response to this attack, to this small Ukrainian victory, has been to threaten to send weapons to third countries in sensitive areas that have an interest in attacking Western structures, infrastructures or positions. 

In reality, this threat is far more credible than the threat to use nuclear weapons that it has been making for the past two years. If this threat to use nuclear weapons has not been given much credibility, this other threat to send long-range weapons to countries with dubious reputations - we already know who Russia's partners are, we are talking about Iran, we are talking about North Korea - we can imagine a series of scenarios that would significantly destabilise the West. 

We can imagine, for example, Russia arming organisations in the Middle East such as Hamas, Hezbollah, or the Houthis in Yemen, who, if they had those weapons, those long-range missiles, imagine what they could do. But Russia also has the capacity to arm vast regions of Africa with this long-range weaponry, which could also lead to coups d'état, civil wars and, above all, to a wave of migration towards Europe, which I don't think we can even imagine. 

And if we go further, in countries such as Cuba or Venezuela, where Russia, the Wagner Group already had a presence and Russia still has a presence today, it could also put the United States' regions on the ropes, where, as I said, the aim is to start an asymmetric war and destabilise various Western countries, without doing so directly, using, as I said, terrorist organisations, countries of dubious reputation or failed states, which could further complicate the international panorama of instability and potential wars that could be started. 

It's certainly true, it's not a Hollywood script, we have these threats on the table. Zelensky, a protagonist in Normandy, it has been exciting to see some veterans calling him the freedom fighter. Zelensky has met with Western leaders, including Biden. 

He was one of those 25 Western leaders invited to the 80th anniversary celebration of the Battle of Normandy and with Biden he took the opportunity to meet with Biden to talk, to ask for the reactivation of the packages, the shipments of military aid packages. We know that Zelensky doesn't miss an opportunity to scrape up wherever he goes, to scrape up the military aid that is so necessary at the moment in Ukraine.

There has been talk of the possibility of starting to send economic assets from the Russian assets that have been seized, in this case from the economic profitability that is being kept in the countries where these assets are frozen, and which for months now have been deciding whether they are finally going to be sent to Ukraine so that they can use them both for the reconstruction of the country and for active defence. 

Let's go deeper, there is a very serious social alert throughout Ukraine because of the blackouts, the attacks against Russian electricity infrastructures, unfortunately they are producing these results.   

And this week there has been a new massive attack that has decimated what little is left of the Ukrainian electricity infrastructure, because this already goes beyond the power stations, the production plants. Russia is also attacking the entire distribution system and the entire transmission system, which is what kept the distribution of electricity in Ukraine up and running. 

What it is doing is preventing the regions where there have been no attacks on the production plants from passing energy to where they have no way of producing it. And well, the catastrophe has not been long in coming. Right now in Kiev, the capital of Ukraine, there are more hours of electricity blackout than there are hours of supply. 

It's not just the Kharkov region, which was already badly affected since 22, when this type of energy infrastructure began to be attacked in Ukraine, but these blackouts have now spread to the Donbass, to Zaporiyia, Odessa is terrible, the capital, as I said, has more hours of power cuts than hours of supply. And it has already begun to be felt also in cities in the west that seemed to be unaffected by this wave of massive attacks on the electricity infrastructure. In a few months, imagine how cold it could get, and add to these power cuts the fact that there will be no heating either. 

Maria, we close with a review of the state of the front lines.

With regard to the battlefronts, right now it seems that the forecasts that announced that the new Russian offensive that the Kremlin had begun on 10 May in the Kharkov region in northeastern Ukraine was intended to separate Ukrainian troops and stop them defending Donbass as strongly as they were defending it so that Russia could advance there, are now coming true. Ukraine has managed to stabilise the Kharkov front line by moving troops and heavy weapons. 

The images we are seeing are of trenches, new trenches built in Kharkov and artillery supporting all the troops that have been mobilised. And what has happened? That these troops, some of whom have left the Donbass, have weakened the Donbass line and that is where Russia is now advancing. 

The Zelensky government has ordered the compulsory evacuation of minors and their parents from several localities close to the front line and everything points to the fact that in the coming weeks, we are going to start the summer with a very critical situation on this Donbass front that seems to be getting more active by the minute.