Kremlin says ‘no need to be afraid’ of Putin

ISTANBUL

Commenting on Lithuanian President Gitanas Nauseda’s remarks in the French capital Paris a day earlier, the Kremlin on Thursday said that there is “no need to be afraid” of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

“Putin must be respected and listened to,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters during a press briefing in Moscow.

Peskov’s remarks came after comments by Nauseda on an assault on Leonid Volkov, an aide to the late Russian opposition figure Alexei Navalny, in the Lithuanian capital Vilnius late Tuesday.

“I can only say one thing to Putin – nobody is afraid of you here,” Nauseda told reporters in Paris amid a working visit to France.

Peskov refrained from commenting on the incident concerning Volkov, expressing that they were “talking about an incident that happened in Lithuania.”

“We cannot comment in any way on what is happening to people in Lithuania; we must contact the Lithuanian Ministry of Internal Affairs and the police,” Peskov added.

‘US unwilling to hear’

Peskov also touched on the reaction of the US to Putin’s interview with state-run Rossiya-1 television, saying there is a “deliberate distortion of the context” and “an unwillingness to hear” what Putin expressed.

“This is a deliberate distortion of the context and a reluctance to listen to President Putin. Again, there is nothing new in this. This is something that we have observed very concentratedly for a long time, especially in the last two years,” Peskov said.

Peskov denied that Putin’s interview caused hysteria in the US, saying that this is being “deliberately taken out of context.”

“No threats about the use of nuclear weapons were made by Putin in this interview … The president was talking about the reasons that could make the use of nuclear weapons inevitable,” Peskov said.

On Wednesday, Putin said that his country is ready for a nuclear war from a "military-technical" point of view and that he did not rule out the testing of nuclear weapons in the case where the US conducted such tests.

White House spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters in a press gaggle that President Joe Biden is aware of Putin’s remarks and that Moscow's nuclear rhetoric has been “reckless and irresponsible” throughout the Russia-Ukraine war.

Peskov also said that the Arctic has been and continues to be a territory of “fairly intense confrontation” between different powers.