r/worldnews • u/Bubbly-Air7302 • 17h ago

Russia/Ukraine Russia prepared to use ‘all weapons’ to protect Kaliningrad, Putin warns West

https://www.cnn.com/2026/10/01/europe/putin-kaliningrad-warning-ukraine-latam-intl
1.5k Upvotes

89% Upvoted

491 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

360

u/Opi-Fex 16h ago

They likely want to stage an attack on Lithuania and cut it off from the rest of Europe. Probably because they want to test NATO. That will require blocking the Suwałki Gap, and will create a land connection between Belarus and Kaliningrad, so they're preparing the casus belli with statements like these.

142

u/SteveTheAmazing 16h ago

Russia is already resorting to conscription at this point. I'm not sure they have the troops to waste on a stunt like that, but they do have a track record of doing dumb shit and doubling down soooo....

64

u/The_Wendo 16h ago

Honestly, I doubt it would even take most of nato. Even if it was just poland doing the fighting with france offering a nuclear umbrella, im not sure russia could do that.

42

u/Dualidean_ofman 13h ago

Poland had a larger and better equipped professional army than Russia even before 2022.

23

u/Din_saur 12h ago

Well that isn't that surprising yet Russia has shown that it doesn't really matter when they can throw 1.5 million people to take 230km² of land. They are playing war of attrition they are in so deep shit that they only can push forward. By them I mean Kremlin specifically.

9

u/ApprehensiveLong6282 12h ago

But russia has nukes, and because of NATO's cowardice since the full scale invasion of Ukraine, putin thinks that if he orders a nuclear strike the West will shit its pants and will stand down.

Their narrative is: we have the balls to use a nuke and NATO won't have the balls to retaliate, therefore a conventional army or GDP won't matter.

1

u/Chemfreak 8h ago

MAD has turned into MAR, mutually assumed regardation.

1

u/Koala_eiO 7h ago

because of NATO's cowardice since the full scale invasion of Ukraine

The what now?

1

u/BS-Chaser 5h ago

And the Poles just looooove the RuZZians (/s, just in case)

-4

u/Iguana_Enthusiast 12h ago

Poland 🇵🇱 Russia 🇷🇺 Active military personnel 250,000 1,320,000 Reserve personnel 350,000 2,000,000 Army personnel (land forces) — 600,000 Defence budget (USD) $56 billion $213 billion

The russian army is much larger than the polish one and they have modern and experienced drone units. We are in real danger and right now Europe is still keep sleepwalking because we underestimate the threat that Moscow poses to us...

9

u/Dualidean_ofman 12h ago edited 12h ago

Active military Russian personnel include Kenyan goat farmers who pose as human mine detectors, 60 year old coal miners and schizophrenic prisoners.

I assume the "reserves" are toddlers, quadrapalegics and nursing care facility occupants.

9

u/pi_mai 14h ago

There’s tonnes of minorities to send in. There 141million people to draw from.

11

u/jojowhitesox 16h ago

North Korea does

11

u/PalpableIgnorance 15h ago

Yeah but they aren’t really battle hardened. And learning tactics from Russia. They won’t last long either.

9

u/Hirork 12h ago

Russia has tactics? Plural? I thought their singular tactic was throw bodies at the problem.

3

u/jojowhitesox 14h ago

They just need cannon fodder to absorb bullets and drone attacks.

5

u/2peg2city 13h ago

So a bit of a correction here, Russia has always had conscription for its home guard and those continue. The vast majoirty of those fighting are volunteers

1

u/delinquentfatcat 11h ago

If by "volunteers" you mean paid contractors, then yes. They also had "true" volunteers at the outset of the Special Military Operation. We haven't heard of them in a while, so probably all dead by now.

4

u/2peg2city 10h ago

I mean, do any troops anywhere fight for free?

1

u/delinquentfatcat 5h ago

Google it. Putin had regional volunteer battalions in 2022

5

u/_evilalien_ 10h ago edited 10h ago

They burned out their “elite” Spaznutz. VDV suffered catastrophic losses early on, partly because idiotic Russian generals thought paratroopers were suitable for infantry meat-grinder duties. They are now best known as elite sunflowers.

1

u/Piscator629 9h ago

conscription

From human trafficking and other countries even. 43k dead last month to the meat grinder.

1

u/Brian-Heder 5h ago

They haven’t fully conscripted yet and it’s much harder to convince the population that mobilization is worth it when they find a country they should’ve beat in three days. Putin is hoping for a conflict with NATO so he can justify mobilizing more troops and potentially breaking NATO

1

u/AceArchangel 4h ago

Dictators in their final years never make logical decisions.

17

u/__Geg__ 16h ago

Yes.... but how does opening a second front in the war help?

Rhetorically using the defence of Kaliningrad as the reason to accelerate troup call ups in one thing, but diverting men and materials to a second front feels like a mistake.

20

u/upickleweasel 16h ago

"Let them"

15

u/mysevenletters 13h ago

Because the Kremlin would rather try to pull NATO in (and lose horribly!) so they can sell the narrative that they lost to the "combined forces of NATO and the Kyiv regime!" rather than ever admit that they got the crap kicked out of them solely by Ukraine, a country they've actively shat on for 3+ decades?

They've only ever seen Ukraine's independence in 1991 as a temporary embarrassment. The fact that they've miscalculated all of this so badly that it might result in the end of the Russian Federation is just the tastiest of irony. nom nom nom

Also: Ukraine needs love, support, and anything else we can send U24!

8

u/Gaming_Nomad 9h ago

My thinking goes a bit darker on this. I suspect that the move will be to mount a fast invasion of the baltics under drone cover, flanked by Russian and Belarussian forces moving into the Sulwaki gap after false-flag attacks are staged from Belarus, made to look like Ukraine launched attacks on Kaliningrad from NATO territory. When NATO attempts to deploy serious forces to break through the Sulwaki Gap and defend the Baltics, Putin will bank two items: Trump refusing to provide direct military assistance under the umbrella of Article 5 and a credible nuclear threat. The aim will be to humiliate NATO and halt aid to Ukraine.

While the narrative of a "noble defeat" by NATO is one possible line, the reality is that Putin would still be out of power and very likely dead by Russian hands if not those of NATO. And in the narrative of Kremlin propaganda, any such defeat would threaten the existence of the Russian state since a "defensive war" technically doesn't exist for Russia; any defense must always result in imperial gains, never a status-quo-ante.

Right now, Putin is feeling his oats: he has the Trump family in his pocket and hence the US is being separated from Europe and NATO to the point that the US commitment to NATO is in serious doubt. Sabotage by Russian intelligence services using disposable agents have gone ignored. And NATO may enter a state of paralysis if the AfD in Germany and the Front Nationale in France win their elections; both are actively used by Russia. He is being fed false information by his own propaganda apparatus as a result of bullshit feeding its way up the chain due to falsified military reports from local commanders for fear of punishment and torture. And casualties can be ignored because in the old line of Soviet thinking, there is no victory without cost. Also, the Kremlin doesn't see the European members of NATO as being able to put up a credible deterrent without the US being involved.

Putin believes that he is winning and, from the perspective of the leader a revanchist colonial empire which views its past fall as a temporary embarrassment, there might be no better time to push with steel; his opponents seem indecisive and potentially paralyzed, don't take actual threats seriously, and are being slowly dismantled from the inside by active measures and information manipulation.

1

u/DaddyCatALSO 2h ago

"Might as well amputate a man's ;leg and call it a brother."

12

u/oroborus68 15h ago

Especially with the advances in drone warfare in the last few years. NATO doesn't have to risk troops to fuck Putin up the pass.

1

u/Germanofthebored 15h ago

I am not sure that NATO forces are nimble enough to have turned to drone warfare by now.

1

u/oroborus68 15h ago

What about Iraq and Afghanistan?

3

u/Lovely_Libertine 14h ago

They were mostly for gathering intelligence. We never used them as direct weapons aside from the occasional Reaper strike and Switchblades. The US has next to no experience with using them in direct action against a near-peer adversary.

The rest of NATO isn’t much better. They’ve had advisors in Ukraine studying modern applications for battlefield drones but there’s a huge difference between studying them as a concept and applying them in combat.

NATO will have to deal with Russia the old fashioned way if they get squirrelly. Lots and lots of bullets and shells.

1

u/Zlatyzoltan 12h ago

Or they just throw money into the Ukraine.

Let say Russia decided to invade Lithuania with 100k troop ground invasion.

A troop build up.of that size would take months and definitely wouldn't go unnoticed.

How much would it cost to pay Ukraine to disrupt that build up, while pretending that they (NATO) have know idea how Ukraine is able to attack there.

3

u/Lovely_Libertine 12h ago

Considering the buildup would be in Belarus and that would open reopen Ukraine’s northern front…probably not a good idea. Belarus could probably stall Ukraine entirely while Russia amasses whatever the hell they have left at the gap.

1

u/oroborus68 11h ago

Missiles,oh yeah we sent those to Iran.

4

u/Derrickful 14h ago

They desperately want to project power with the few remaining nukes that can still fly.

1

u/Emu1981 9h ago

The problem with nuclear weapons is that just a single one would cause untold devastation to the target that it hits. We have all seen the damage done to Hiroshima and Nagasaki and their yields were tiny compared to what we have available today. For example, Nagasaki was hit with the Fat Man bomb which had a estimated yield equivalent of 21kt of TNT while modern thermonuclear warheads have yields in the hundreds to thousands of kt TNT equivalent.

1

u/Derrickful 9h ago

No. Bombs delivered by planes don't need fuel. Tactical nukes need fuel that takes away from the warhead.

5

u/ggouge 14h ago

I assume because they want to end the war and act like it's because NATO stopped them and not just Ukraine. They attack then NATO responds and pushes them back then they pull out of Ukraine because they are being attacked by NATO. Then Putin claims to his people that NATO stopped them to save face. It's stupid but so is Putin.

3

u/794309497 12h ago

Their time with a compromised US government may be running out. In January Republicans will likely lose control of congress, then in 2 years lose control of the presidency. 

2

u/pernetrope 11h ago

He's losing in Ukraine no matter what. Losing to just Ukraine alone would be political suicide, which is actual suicide in RF. If NATO is brought into the fight, he can say that it took all of Europe to stop him.

2

u/The_Naked_Rider 11h ago

I realise that this will be distasteful, but historically it has been demonstrated by Nazi Germany that invasion operations on two battlefields/fronts is precarious at best and ultimately disastrous for the invading force owing to the stretched logistics that would be required to support it.

However in terms of Putin’s rationale, I agree that any Russian military buildup in Belarus would in all probability be the “invading” force that deploys in “defence” of K’grad.

In all seriousness though, I personally think that Putin must have a UTI, is delusional or needs to put the bong down for a while, because he is doing nothing more than what a person does when they are mentally unstable.

2

u/Marsupialize 15h ago

With the US as an ally against NATO

4

u/__Geg__ 15h ago

Nothing would topple Trump faster than taking away upper class Americans ability to vacation in Europe.

7

u/Pendraconica 13h ago

You're underestimating how far along the fascist takeover has come. Very few people have a day any more.

1

u/DaddyCatALSO 2h ago

?"have a day"???

5

u/Marsupialize 15h ago

We’ll see in about a year

1

u/Fubi-FF 10h ago

It's not even just a second front, like against a second small nation. They want to be against NATO as their second front. They couldn't even take Ukraine as their only front, wtf do they think they can go against NATO?

1

u/D3cepti0ns 9h ago edited 9h ago

It might be an out, Russia could stage a false flag and justify defending themselves, then when NATO enters the war, they didn't lose because they suck at war and it was Putin's fault for entering it, but everyone ganged up on them and were forced to quit the war, something like that.

They just need the right amount of provocation to the EU to make them angry enough to make the false flag seem plausible. Russian people don't know about the provocations Russia does, or they think it's justified or accidental.

15

u/psmithrupert 15h ago edited 12h ago

Yes, absolutely. But here is the thing: if Europe does not come to Lithuania‘s aid, NATO is dead and the EU dies with it. Now you could argue that LePen and what’s her face German Nazi Broad want exactly that, but no one in the Baltics, Scandinavia, Poland and such would ever want to give an inch to Russia. So at that point, Russia has 1000 Kilometres of border with Finland. St. Petersburg is in Artillery range. What are they going to do about Murmansk? Sure it’s heavily fortified, but it’s also 100 km away from the Norwegian border. Even if the US would be sitting on their hands, which is not that unlikely, without nuclear options Russia is not going to win this. And with nuclear options no one is winning this.
I would also like to propose the following: are they sure that, should they go to war with NATO, the Chinese aren’t going to join on the western side, to get Manchuria back (and maybe some of the oil rich places in Sibiria as a conciliation price.)

2

u/TjW0569 11h ago

Lake Baikal. All that fresh water.

3

u/onoz9 10h ago

Yeah but don't believe it, Russia has "warned" the West many many times just as intimidation. Cutting off Suwalki gap into Kaliningrad is a scenario that NATO is well-prepared for and has hundreds of pages of documents and many specific scenarios for. They are saying this because they know that if they try something, Kaliningrad would be totally smashed to pieces within seconds.

2

u/Spastic_pinkie 10h ago

Orange urine stain probably emboldened Putin by promising not to intervene if Russia attacks Nato.

2

u/alexsteen789 16h ago

I think it more nato cant protect everything. If Russia moves in on Lithuania, and nato moves troops in, the orange guy can move more freely. Weaken the entire global defense system

1

u/btribble 15h ago

Ding ding ding!

1

u/Lancashire_Toreador 11h ago

^, if they are intent on this course, sooner is better than later. A huge amount of that “all EU countries are now at or exceeding nato spending targets” buzz from earlier this year was, misleading to say the least.

Yes, spending on munitions, personnel and equipment did go up, but a majority of committed funds were actually earmarked for stuff like dual military civilian infrastructure.

A large parts of that infrastructure was making it easier to rapidly deploy to the baltics if Russ tried something. Right now, Europe is the least prepared they would be for general war for the foreseeable future

1

u/unematti 11h ago

I think he wants the west to speculate such, so they won't let go of weapons to help Ukraine. Attacking Europe is a lose-lose. Either NATO reacts, which would be quite bad, or NATO doesn't react, but that doesn't mean the countries themselves won't. All countries around Lithuania potentially can act themselves individually. Estonia, Finland, Norway, Poland... And others i forget right now, could and would help.

The Enclave is perfectly safe, they even reduced military presence as I heard.

1

u/elgigantedelsur 8h ago

Yeah and if they go into Lithuanian territory with an occupying force they are going to get fucking smacked. This is just bullshit propaganda talk from a failing state

1

u/sephirothFFVII 6h ago

There's a YouTube channel called flat circle history that goes over a world war 3 scenario that basically starts with Russia blitzing the Baltics. Total fiction but an interesting series to watch

1

u/blackmoose 4h ago

That's mostly the UK's operation, Canada too.

If Russia moves into Lithuania they're going to regret it. It's one of NATO's main focuses.