Russia and Ukraine: will Putin push the nuclear button?

I will start with an admission. Many times I have thought: “Putin would never do this”. Then he goes and does it.

“Surely he would never annex Crimea?” And he did. “I would never start a war in Donbas.” She did it. “He would never launch a full-scale invasion of Ukraine.” He has.

I came to the conclusion that the phrase “I would never” does not apply to Vladimir Putin. And that raises an awkward question:

“He would never be the first to push the nuclear button. Or if?”.

It is not a theoretical question. The leader of Russia He has just put his country’s nuclear forces on “special” alert.complaining about “aggressive statements” about Ukraine by NATO leaders.

Listen carefully to what President Putin has been saying. Last Thursday, when he announced on television his “special military operation” (actually a full-scale invasion of Ukraine), he issued a chilling warning:

“To anyone who considers interfering from the outside: if you do, will face bigger consequences than it has ever faced in history“, said.

The “master of the planet”

“Putin’s words sound like a direct threat of nuclear war,” believes Nobel Peace Prize laureate Dimitri Muratov, editor-in-chief of the newspaper. Novaya Gazeta.

“In that television speech, Putin was not acting as the master of the Kremlin, but like the master of the planet”, it states.

“In the same way that the owner of a shiny car shows off by twiddling his key fob on his finger, Putin was twiddling the nuclear button.”

“He has said many times: ‘If there is no Russia, why do we need the planet?’ No one has paid attention. But this is a threat that if Russia is not treated the way he wants, then everything will be destroyed,” Muratov says.

In a 2018 documentary, President Putin commented that “…if someone decides to annihilate Russia, we have a legal right to respond. Yes, it will be a catastrophe for humanity and for the world. But I am a citizen of Russia and its head of state. Why do we need a world without Russia?

Fast-forward to 2022. Putin has launched a full-scale war against Ukraine, but the Ukrainian military is putting up stiff resistance.

Western nations have united, to the surprise of the Kremlinto impose potentially damaging economic and financial sanctions against Moscow.

The very existence of Putin’s system may have been called into question.

“Putin is in a bind”believes Moscow-based defense analyst Pavel Felgenhauer.

“You don’t have many options left, once the West freezes the Russian Central Bank’s assets and Russia’s financial system really implodes, that will make the system unviable.”

“One option for him is to cut off gas supplies to Europe, hoping that will cause the Europeans to back down.

“Another option is explode a nuke somewhere over the north sea between the UK and Denmark and see what happens,” says Felgenhauer.

If Vladimir Putin chose a nuclear option, would someone in his inner circle try to dissuade him? Or would they try to stop it?

“The political elites of Russia they are never with the people”says Nobel laureate Dimitri Muratov. “They always side with the ruler.”

And in Vladimir Putin’s Russia the ruler is all-powerful. This is a country with few checks and balances; it is the Kremlin that rules.

“No one is ready to take on Putin”, says Pavel Felgenhauer. “We are in a dangerous place.”

The war in Ukraine is Vladimir Putin’s war. If the Kremlin leader achieves his military goals, Ukraine’s future as a sovereign nation will be in doubt.

If it is perceived to be failing and suffers heavy casualties, the fear is that this could lead the Kremlin to adopt more desperate measures.

Especially in that case, the “would never” would cease to apply.

How has the West reacted?

After Vladimir Putin declared on Sunday that he was putting his nuclear forces on “special alert,” a status reminiscent of some of the most dangerous moments of the Cold War, some Western countries reacted to the statement.

UK Defense Secretary Ben Wallace said Putin has engaged in a “battle of rhetoric” to “remind the world” that you have a deterrent: their nuclear weapons.

“We don’t see or recognize, in the kind of phrase or the status that you described, anything that is a change from the nuclear posture that it currently has,” Wallace told the BBC.

“This is mostly about Putin putting it on the table just to remind people, remind the world, that he has a deterrent.”

The defense secretary said the UK is also a nuclear power and its deterrence had “kept our security for decades”.

“Unacceptable”

For its part, the United States called the statement as a “totally unacceptable escalation” of the tensions.

“President Putin continues to escalate this war in a totally unacceptable way, and we have to continue to condemn his actions in the strongest possible way,” Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the US ambassador to the UN, told the show. face the nation of the CBS network.

But Thomas Greenfield He stated that he is “not surprised” that Putin has threatened to prepare Russia’s nuclear forces, since, he said, the Russian leader “has tried by all possible means to instill fear in the world with his action.”

“It just means that we have to increase our efforts here at the United Nations and elsewhere to hold it accountable,” he said. (I)