Russian president delivered the warning after Seoul announced it would consider arming Kyiv.
Russian President Vladimir Putin Thursday warned South Korea that sending lethal weapons to Ukraine would be a “big mistake.”
His comments come after Seoul announced it would consider arming Ukraine in response to Russia and North Korea signing a mutual defense pact on Wednesday.
“If South Korea supplies weapons to Ukraine, it will not like the answer. I hope they won’t do it, it would be a big mistake,” Putin said at a press conference in Vietnam, where he is conducting a two-day state visit aimed at deepening strategic cooperation.
I’m sure China would be thrilled if Russia started WWIII on their border.
But let’s be honest though, world war III started 3 years ago and as of right now there are currently 9 more active conflicts going on worldwide than the peak of world war II, but no one is going to call it a world war until the superpowers are in direct conflict with each other.
World wars don’t start until the superpowers are in direct conflict. That’s what defines a “World War”. There are always multiple conflicts going on around the globe.
Are you really putting the regional conflicts occuring today in the same category as World War II, where over 70,000,000 people were killed? “World War III started 3 years ago” is the stuff of a conspiracist’s fever dream and is not based in any objective reality
On the other hand ww2 arguably started with Japan’s invasion of China in 1937. So it is possible that the Ukraine conflict is the opening stages of ww3, but say it definitely is the start of ww3 is way overstating it.
The Ukraine invasion is totally different though, the international community has already been involved for years and the front lines are more or less static at this point. What Japan did in China…no one stopped them and they kept going all over the Pacific. Another difference was Japan and Germany being formidable powers, Russia is nothing of the sort today, and China is smart enough to stay away
Agreed, WW2 scale became crazy because Japan and Germany were just allowed to conquer so much so fast before a meaningful response. Russia is being held to a much tighter theater from the onset.
I agree that seeing the current regional conflicts as the opening shots of WWIII is a bit hyperbolic, but I also think a much better comparison is the Balkan Wars of 1912-13 and the related July Crisis considering how the major powers are being lead through proxy conflicts into “a series of interrelated diplomatic and military escalations.”
I would have said that too…until I watched the Ryan McBeth video about it. I’m still not sure he’s correct but he does make a convincing argument that were not only in it but that it started in 2014.
At that point you’re kind of arguing that there was only one World War with a 20-year armistice. I can see what they mean, and certainly tensions are escalating, but we’ve still made a concerted effort to not drag more people in while limiting the expansion of Russia’s territory.
In 5 or 10 years we will be talking about how we avoided the Russia-Ukraine conflict expanding into another world war or we will be talking about how these were the first stages of that conflict.
I was just about to link that video. He does put forward a convincing thesis in fairness to him.
His argument doesn’t make it sound at all like WW II though, there are way more parallels with the Cold War