As President of Russia from 2008 to 2012 Dmitry Medvedev he cultivated the image of a quiet, moderate politician striving for even relations with the West. From the moment it erupted war in Ukrainehowever, he set out to defeat even the most aggressive “hawks” of the Russian elite, from the position of his vice president Russian Security Council, under Putin. The last link in the chain so far has been his warning about a pre-emptive nuclear strike against Ukraine in the event of an attempt to supply the latter with Western nuclear weapons. “There are immutable laws of war. When it comes to nuclear weapons, it should be nuclear strikeThis was stated by Medvedev in an interview with Russian media. No Western power has raised the issue of Ukraine’s nuclear weapons, but officials in Kyiv have left the possibility open if their country is not allowed to NATO. In the same statements, Medvedev predicted that “this conflict could last for a long time, maybe decades” and that there was no room for ceasefire negotiations with Kiev as long as “clown Zelensky” was in power.

At the same time, the Russian Foreign Ministry yesterday invited senior US diplomats on a trip to protest his statements. Jake Sullivan, White House national security adviser. Speaking to CNN, Sullivan distanced himself from the recent Ukrainian attacks on Russian soil, saying that the Biden administration does not encourage such actions and does not allow Kyiv to use American systems for this purpose. At the same time, he called the Ukrainian attacks on Crimea, which Russia annexed in 2014, legal. And we believe that Crimea it belongs to Ukraine,” the US official said. Reaffirming this position, the Russian Foreign Ministry said yesterday in a statement: “It is time for Washington to understand that any form of attack on Russia will find the strongest response.”

I will contact Putin again when the time is right,” Soltz says. “Russia is striking a clinic in Dnipro.

In another ad, Russian Foreign Ministry for the first time, he positioned himself positively in relation to the Vatican’s peace initiative, specifying, however, that the visit of the papal envoy to Moscow had not yet been scheduled. Yesterday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov met with Beijing’s special envoy for peace in Ukraine, Li Hui. For his part, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said he would contact the Russian president again. Vladimir Putin in Ukrainian “when the time comes.” In an interview with the Koelner Stadt-Anzeiger newspaper, he said: “Russia must understand that we cannot talk about making some kind of cold peace … Instead, we must achieve a just peace that requires the withdrawal of Russian troops from Ukraine.” . However, the German chancellor did not specify whether the withdrawal also applies to the Crimean peninsula and parts of eastern Ukraine, which came under de facto Russian control in 2014.

On the battlefield yesterday, a Russian missile hit a psychiatric clinic in the center of Dnipro, killing two people and injuring 30. Vladimir Zelensky spoke about another “war crime” of Moscow. In Bakhmut, Wagner’s private army began to hand over the city, which it had captured on the previous Saturday, to the regular Russian army.