From Euractiv, June 15:
DISCLAIMER: All opinions in this column reflect the views of the author(s), not of EURACTIV Media network.
For what it’s worth, we read articles by Russian influencers about the war Vladimir Putin started in Ukraine. A recent one by Sergei Kaganov, a university professor and honorary chairman of the Presidium of the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy, suggests a disturbing endgame.
The author doesn’t seem to be so naïve to imagine that the Russian army will conquer the whole territory of Ukraine, nor does he think that Russia has the resources to keep control of the Western territories of Ukraine, where he expects guerilla-type of resistance.
As an endgame, he imagines “a more attractive option”, what he calls “the liberation and reunification of the East and South”, while the rest of Ukraine would be demilitarised and transformed into “a buffer, friendly state”.
But such an outcome is possible only if Russia breaks the will of the West to support Kyiv, he argues. The rest of his article is about how to achieve this goal.
Like many other pro-Kremlin analysts, Kaganov pleads for lowering the threshold for the use of nuclear weapons and increasing the fear of their use among the population in the West.
Many Russian analysts believe that their country has invested in possibly the biggest nuclear arsenal but that, since it cannot use it out of fear of nuclear holocaust, something must change.
Kaganov believes that deploying Russian tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus is a first step in lowering the nuclear threshold.
“The enemy must know that we are ready to strike a preemptive retaliatory (nuclear) strike for all of his current and past aggressions to prevent a slide into global thermonuclear war,” he writes.
No matter how weird this may sound, Kaganov believes that using a limited nuclear strike in Europe would not escalate to a nuclear holocaust.
Like many other Russian influencers, Kaganov believes that the US president, no matter who he is, would not come to the defence of the Europeans by using the US strategic nuclear arsenal. He writes that unless the US president is a “madman”, he would not sacrifice Boston for the Polish city of Poznan.
The author also seems to suggest that the Russian nuclear blackmail could produce effects at the psychological level.
He imagines a scenario in which Russia would advise its compatriots living in European countries to leave their places of residence “near objects that could become targets of nuclear strikes in countries that directly support the Kyiv regime”.
In the author’s view, the panic created could “reason the enemy”, discourage the West from continuing to support Ukraine, and achieve the endgame as already described.
And he asks a rhetorical question:
“But what if they don’t back down? Have you completely lost your sense of self-preservation? Then we will have to hit a group of targets in a number of countries to revive those who have lost their minds.”
And the story doesn’t end here....
....MUCH MORE
