MOSCOW — Russia was prepared to activate its nuclear arsenal a year ago when its troops secured the Crimean peninsula and annexed it to the Russian Federation, President Vladimir Putin said in a broadcast aired Sunday.
The film, “Crimea: Path to the Motherland” — timed to today’s anniversary of a referendum in which Crimeans voted to secede from Ukraine — features Putin justifying Moscow’s seizure of the Black Sea territory as necessary to protect Russians and military bases from what he described as a nationalist junta that had taken power in Kiev.
Putin accused the United States of masterminding the three-month uprising in the Ukrainian capital that ended with the ouster of Kremlin-allied President Viktor Yanukovich, who has since taken refuge in Russia. He said the “beneficiaries of the armed coup” planned to kill Yanukovich, prompting Putin to order Russian military intervention to protect the political ally and save Crimea from attack by Ukrainian nationalists.
The film projected a vibrant and defiant image of the Russian president, who hadn’t been seen in public for more than a week.
The Kremlin website on Sunday also carried a message of condolence from Putin on the death of Russian writer Valentin Rasputin, adding to the impression that he is on top of state affairs.
The documentary covered the year since the March 16, 2014, referendum in which 97 percent of voters among Crimea’s 2 million residents were said to have supported secession. Two days later, Putin issued a decree annexing the peninsula, which is home to Russia’s Black Sea fleet and Soviet-era air bases.
The film was a montage of images of Russian paratroopers coming to the rescue of Crimeans, Putin’s observations on his obligation to protect Russians outside his country and re-enacted clashes between Ukrainian nationalists and the police and security forces defeated by the popular uprising in Kiev.
Masked Ukrainian zealots were depicted in re-enacted segments hunting Russians with attack dogs and barbed-wire-wrapped truncheons. Fiery scenes of torched police vehicles and black-clad rightists attacking law enforcement cast the overthrow of Yanukovich as a violent, Western-inspired coup, and the Russian minority in Crimea and eastern Ukraine as the targets of fascist death squads.
The United States, along with Poland and Lithuania, “facilitated the armed coup” by training the nationalists, Putin said.
U.S. and European officials have denied any role in the Ukrainian uprising against Yanukovich, who sought to scuttle a free-trade agreement between Kiev and the European Union that would have undermined Moscow’s influence in Ukraine.
Western sanctions against Russia over the Crimea land grab have compounded the economic blow of falling oil prices, plunging the country into an economic crisis.
Part of the operation to secure Crimea from the unrest that led to and followed the ouster of Yanukovich on Feb. 21, 2014, included the deployment of K-300P Bastion-P coastal defense missiles to demonstrate Russia’s willingness to protect the peninsula from military attack, Putin said in the 2 1/2-hour film aired on Rossiya-1 television.
“We deployed them in a way that made them clearly visible from space,” Putin said of the missiles and the message they sent to what he cast as Kiev’s Western taskmasters.
He also said the Russian military had been prepared to put nuclear weapons on alert if necessary, the latest in a series of threats to deploy the nuclear option to counter what he suggests is a U.S. plot to dominate Russia.