The White House on Sunday responded to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s decision to order Russia’s nuclear deterrence forces on high alert following a heroic resistance from Ukraine forces and a barrage of sanctions that is threatening to cripple Russia’s economy
Appearing for an interview on ABC’s “This Week,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki said that Putin’s move is part of a wider pattern of unprovoked escalation and “manufactured threats” from the Kremlin.
“This is really a pattern that we’ve seen from President Putin through the course of this conflict, which is manufacturing threats that don’t exist in order to justify further aggression — and the global community and the American people should look at it through that prism,” Psaki told host George Stephanopoulos.
Another senior administration official accused Putin of “yet another escalatory and totally unnecessary step” in an unjustified war.
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“At every step of this conflict Putin has manufactured threats to justify more aggressive actions — he was never under threat from Ukraine or from NATO, which is a defensive alliance that will not fight in Ukraine,” the official told CNN on Sunday “This is yet another escalatory and totally unnecessary step,” he added.
US Ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield similarly blasted Putin’s actions as unnecessarily escalatory on Sunday, telling CBS News that he “is continuing to escalate this war in a manner that is totally unacceptable.”
“We have to continue to condemn his actions in … the strongest possible way,” she told CBS News. “Putin has tried every means possible to actually put fear in the world in terms of his action, and it just means that we have to ramp up our efforts here at the United Nations and elsewhere to hold him accountable.”
