Joe Biden and allied leaders have reacted angrily to Vladimir Putin’s threats to use nuclear weapons and pledged to maintain support for Ukraine in the face of Russia’s partial mobilisation and planned annexation of more Ukrainian regions.
The Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, also shrugged off Putin’s moves to escalate the war, saying his country’s forces would continue their counter-offensive, not giving Russia breathing space to mobilise and dig in on Ukrainian soil.
“We can return the Ukrainian flag to our entire territory. We can do it with the force of arms, but we need time,” Zelenskiy said in a pre-recorded broadcast to the UN general assembly, which Russia had tried to stop but was overwhelmingly voted down by member states.
“Russia wants to spend the winter on the occupied territory of Ukraine … It wants to prepare fortifications on occupied land and carry out military mobilisation at home. We cannot agree to a delayed war because it will be even hotter than the war now.”
Both Biden and Zelenskiy sought to deepen Russia’s isolation, on a day when North Korea said it would not supply ammunition to Russian forces. In his speech to the general assembly on Wednesday, Biden sought to unite the international community in the face of what he called “reckless” threats and “an extremely significant violation” of the UN charter.
The US president was speaking hours after Putin announced Russia’s first mobilisation since the second world war and warned that Moscow had “lots of weapons to reply” to what he claimed were western threats on its territory.
A senior US administration official said the US would not lessen its commitment to helping Ukraine defend itself. The official said Putin’s latest actions were an “act of weakness” that showed his “desperation”.
“This is another episode in what has been a series of episodes over the course of this war where Putin is trying to rattle his sabre trying to scare us off,” the senior official said. “He has not succeeded before – he won’t succeed now, but that doesn’t mean that we’re blind to the dynamics that could relate to escalation and that we weren’t thinking carefully through in close consultation with our allies and with Ukrainians how we would deal with that.”
Biden portrayed the Russian leader and his “imperial ambitions” as a threat to the founding values of the UN, seeking to consolidate Ukraine’s global support and coax some developing countries away from their neutral stance, as Putin raised the stakes.
“This war is about extinguishing Ukraine’s right to exist as a state, plain and simple, and Ukraine’s right to exist as a people. Wherever you are, wherever you live, whatever you believe, that should make your blood run cold,” Biden said.
“Because if nations can pursue their imperial ambitions without consequences, then we put at risk everything this very institution stands for.”
In his speech, Zelenskiy reminded world leaders of the mass graves being exhumed in the recently liberated town of Izium as the general assembly gathered, saying that among the bodies was a man strangled with a rope, and another who had been castrated before the murder. The Ukrainian president said that was not the first of such atrocities.
He told the global assembly: “Ask, please, the representatives of Russia why the Russian military are so obsessed with castration. What was done to them so that they want to do this to others?”
As Zelenskiy was speaking, a rare bit of good news emerged from the conflict: a prisoner swap in which Russia released 215 Ukrainian soldiers – many of whom had fought a last stand in the Azovstal steelworks in Mariupol in May – in exchange for 55 Russians and Viktor Medvedchuk, a pro-Russian Ukrainian politician and oligarch who had taken sides with the Russian invaders.
The US national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, thanked the Ukrainian government for including two US citizens among 10 foreign fighters it asked to be freed as part of the swap, and also thanked Saudi Arabia and its crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, for facilitating the deal.
The UK prime minister, Liz Truss, dismissed Putin’s threats, telling the UN assembly late on Wednesdy: “We have seen Putin trying to justify his catastrophic failures.
“He is doubling down by sending even more reservists to a terrible fate. He is desperately trying to claim the mantle of democracy for a regime without human rights or freedoms. And he is making yet more bogus claims and sabre-rattling threats. This will not work.”
Earlier on Wednesday, Putin had delivered a highly anticipated televised address to declare a “partial mobilisation”, which he claimed was a direct response to the dangers posed by the west, which he said wanted “to destroy our country” and was trying to “turn Ukraine’s people into cannon fodder”.
“Military service will apply only to citizens who are currently in the reserve, especially those who have served in the armed forces, have certain military professions and relevant experience,” he said.
Shortly after Putin’s announcement, the country’s defence minister, Sergei Shoigu, said 300,000 Russians would be called up as part of the mobilisation that will apply to “those with previous military experience”.
The announcement triggered an exodus of Russian men scrambling to avoid the draft. Air tickets rose in price and were soon sold out. Russian opposition groups called for nationwide anti-war street protests and by Wednesday evening, more than 1,300 people had been arrested at the demonstrations, according to the independent protest monitoring group OVD-Info.
“Putin’s announcement of a partial mobilisation is an act of desperation,” the German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, said on Twitter. “Russia cannot win this criminal war. Putin has underestimated the situation from the outset – including the will to resist of Ukraine and the resolve shown by its friends.”
Nato’s secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, said there had been no perceived change in the deployment Russian nuclear forces.
“The most important thing is to prevent that from happening, and that’s the reason why we have been so clear in our communications with Russia about the unprecedented consequences, about the fact that the nuclear war cannot be won by Russia,” Stoltenberg told Reuters.
Putin’s announcement came a day after Russian-controlled regions in eastern and southern Ukraine announced plans to hold “referendums” this weekend on becoming part of Russia. In his speech, Putin gave support to those ballots in the parts of Ukraine’s Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia runder Russian control.
He also delivered barely veiled nuclear threats against Nato, saying: “I want to remind you that our country also has various means of destruction, and for separate components and more modern than those of Nato countries and when the territorial integrity of our country is threatened, to protect Russia and our people, we will certainly use all the means at our disposal.”
Putin added: “It’s not a bluff.”
The Russian leader and his senior officials have made a string of similar nuclear threats since launching the invasion in February, in an effort to deter Nato countries from intervening. But in his UN speech on Wednesday, Biden sought to make clear the US and its allies would not be deterred from supporting Ukraine’s fight to defend its territory.
“Russia has shamelessly violated the core tenets of the United Nations charter, none more important than the clear prohibition against countries taking the territory of their neighbour by force,” Biden said.
“The Kremlin is organising a sham referendum to try to annex parts of Ukraine, an extremely significant violation of the UN charter. This world should see these outrageous acts for what they are.
“Again, just today, President Putin has made overt nuclear threats against Europe and a reckless disregard for the responsibilities of the non-proliferation regime,” he said, adding that such “irresponsible nuclear threats” directly contradicted Russia’s international responsibilities and its agreement with a joint statement by nuclear weapons powers at the beginning of this year that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought”.
Seeking support from the developing world in what he framed as a contest between democracy and dictatorship, Biden offered US support for reform of the UN security council to make it more inclusive as well asbillion of dollars for global food security and efforts to curb disease.
US officials have conceded that their focus on Ukraine has led some developing countries from the global south to feel that their concerns were being ignored in a great power showdown.
In his speech on Wednesday, Biden sought to address those fears, pledging $2.9bn for food security this year, and $6bn for the global fund to fight Aids tuberculosis and malaria.
He also threw US support behind a longstanding demand for a more inclusive and representative security council with more permanent and non-permanent members, including permanent seats for countries from Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean.
