John Kirby, the National Security Council’s coordinator for strategic communications, said Russian President Vladimir Putin’s announcement of an immediate partial mobilization was “expected” and “a sign that he is struggling.” “I think there was a lot in there that was typical — a lot that we’ve heard before,” Kirby said during an appearance on ABC’s “Good Morning America,” referring to Putin’s baseless claims of neo-Nazis in Ukraine and that the Russians . territorial integrity is threatened. Kirby said Putin’s announcement of a partial reserve mobilization is “a lot” and “almost double what he committed to war in February of this year.” He tried to cast Putin’s speech, which comes just hours before US President Joe Biden’s speech at the United Nations, as a sign of weakness. “It’s definitely a sign that he’s fighting and we know he has tens of thousands of victims. It has terrible unit morale cohesion on the battlefield command and control has not yet been resolved. He has desertion issues and forces the injured back into the game. So clearly, manpower is a problem for him. It feels like it’s on the back foot, particularly in this northeastern Donbas region,” Kirby said. More than 75,000 Russian soldiers have been killed or wounded during the war in Ukraine, Biden administration officials told US lawmakers during a classified briefing in July, but it is difficult to independently measure the war’s casualties. Kirby also said the U.S. takes Putin’s nuclear threats “seriously,” but that rhetoric was “not uncharacteristic.” “It’s irresponsible rhetoric for a nuclear power to talk that way, but it’s not unusual for how it’s been talking for the last seven months, and we take it very seriously. We monitor their strategic stance as best we can, so that if necessary we can change ours. We have seen no indication that this is required at this time,” he said. There would be “serious consequences” for using nuclear weapons, Kirby warned. Kirby echoed national security adviser Jake Sullivan’s preview Tuesday of Biden’s U.N. remarks, saying Biden will be “very clear about where we stand on Russia and Ukraine,” and also reiterated the commitment of USA on the UN Charter.
