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ANALYSIS | US warnings against Putin's nuclear threats are a worrying fact for the world

2022-09-26T08:35:25.689Z


Many Western observers believe that Putin is bluffing and that there are strategic reasons for Moscow to stop short of this fateful step.


Would Russia use nuclear weapons to defeat Ukraine?

2:52

(CNN) --

That the United States is being forced to warn Russia publicly, and in more strident terms in private, not to use nuclear weapons is a sign of how dangerous the battle over Ukraine has become -- and how much riskier it could become. .

The war is in a new critical phase.

Kyiv's forces won victories in the east using billions of dollars in Western-supplied weapons, and Russian President Vladimir Putin responded by sending thousands more men to the front lines.

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Faced with mounting political pressure at home, isolation abroad and humiliation on the battlefield, the Russian leader stepped up his nuclear policy last week, warning that he could use all available weapons systems if he judged the territorial integrity of Russia was threatened.

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But White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan issued an ominous public warning to Putin on Sunday.

"If Russia crosses this line, there will be catastrophic consequences for Russia. The United States will respond decisively," Sullivan said on NBC's "Meet the Press."

She added that on private channels, the US warning had been harsher, but she refused to draw red lines to keep those contacts open and avoid "a rhetorical eye for an eye."

Secretary of State Antony Blinken reinforced that message on CBS's "60 Minutes" in another sign that Washington is increasingly adding a public element to its private pressure on the Kremlin on this issue.

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"It is very important that Moscow hear from us and know from us that the consequences would be horrible," Blinken said.

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Putin's rhetoric was a reminder that the better the war goes for Ukraine, the more the West will need to remain calm, especially if the Russian leader becomes more boxed in and tries to scare his enemies with Russia's best asset: its nuclear arsenal. .

Many Western observers believe that Putin is bluffing and that there are strategic reasons for Moscow to stop short of this fateful step.

There are no public reports that the Kremlin is preparing its inventory of nuclear weapons on the battlefield for use or that it has changed the posture of its international strategic missiles.

And Putin has played the nuclear card earlier in the conflict in an apparent effort to scare the Western public and fracture support for Kyiv in the transatlantic alliance.

But at the same time, the Russian leader has plunged headlong into a war he cannot afford to lose but in which Russia is getting worse and worse, as last week's partial national mobilization showed.

He is in a corner, a reality that may explain his return to nuclear scare tactics.

And while Putin's political position does not seem immediately threatened, he faces growing internal dissent and seems consumed by a rage against the United States and the West that is vehement even for him.

Putin is driven by a sense of historical mission rooted in a desire to restore respect for Russia as a great civilization.

He has already shown callous disregard for human and civilian life in Ukraine.

Such conditions mean that clear strategic thinking and rational decisions cannot be taken for granted, especially since the Russian leader's ruthless sense of caution deserted him with his reckless leadership of the war in Ukraine.

And, worryingly, Blinken admitted that it remains to be seen whether Russia's nuclear chain of command would work if the military's top brass wanted to prevent any attempt by Putin to use nuclear weapons.

"That's the Achilles' heel of autocracies anywhere: there's usually no one who has the ability or the will to speak truth to power. And part of the reason, I think, is that Russia has gotten into The mess she's in is because there's no one in the system to effectively tell Putin that he's doing the wrong thing."

A crude message from the US

It is in this dangerous atmosphere that Washington issued its warning, designed to deter Putin from a cycle of escalation that could increase the risk that he might consider, or at least threaten to use, a limited-yield tactical nuclear weapon in Ukraine to offset the failure of its military in a conventional conflict.

The US message also seemed intended for those around the Russian leader, in high-level positions in the military or intelligence agencies, for example, who may be in a position to influence his thinking or block his ability to carry out carry out their threats.

CNN has reported that the United States has been privately warning Russia against any use of a nuclear device for several months.

The State Department was involved and Washington also used intelligence channels to communicate with Moscow during the war, a source said.

  • The Russian military is divided over Putin's effort to curb Ukraine's counteroffensive, US sources say.

What the catastrophic consequences that Sullivan mentioned would be has not been detailed.

But given the scale of any use of nuclear weapons, many military and diplomatic experts argue that a response would have to be much tougher than another round of sanctions on Russia's already ailing economy.

The humanitarian and environmental impact of using even a limited-yield nuclear device would outweigh the horror and civil carnage already unleashed in Ukraine.

And its use would also take the world over a dangerous strategic threshold and set a precedent for the use of nuclear weapons to change the equation in conventional conflicts, potentially causing other rogue states to rush to obtain such a capability.

Given the stakes, some Western observers believe NATO would have no choice but to consider direct intervention in the Ukraine conflict that President Joe Biden has always desperately tried to prevent, perhaps by using air power against Russian forces.

Such a move would be one of the most dangerous moments in the history of US clashes with Moscow.

It would risk triggering another dangerous cycle of escalation that could lead to a disastrous conflict between the US and Russia, the world's leading nuclear powers, which was fortunately kept at bay throughout the Cold War, a period of 40 years. in which the planet lived under the shadow of Armageddon.

That possibility, for now, seems a long way off and would require a lot of things to go wrong and a lot of off-ramps to be missed.

A potential goal of US diplomacy in the short term could also be to pressure nations such as China and India, which still have viable relations with Russia, to convey the kind of global ostracism that Moscow could face if it used its nuclear arsenal.

Still, the sight of the president's top foreign policy adviser warning Moscow of the consequences of using nuclear weapons in the midst of what is effectively a proxy war in Europe between the West and the Kremlin is a sobering sign of the gravity of the the situation.

Read Putin's mind

Putin's warning that he was not lying about his willingness to use nuclear weapons if, in his perception, Russia came under attack has sparked public and private speculation about what is driving his thinking.

Holding what the West sees as bogus referendums in captured areas of Ukraine raises the possibility that Putin may see Ukrainian attacks using Western-provided weapons in such areas as an attack on Russia itself.

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Partly as a result, CNN Chief Intelligence and Law Enforcement Analyst John Miller reported last week that no one in the US intelligence community is zeroing out the possibility that Putin could use a weapon. nuclear.

Intelligence analysts have spent years assessing how the psychological forces at work in Putin would develop if a leader obsessed with appearing strong began to appear weak, Miller reported.

Meanwhile, French President Emmanuel Macron told CNN's Jake Tapper last week that the isolation effects of Covid-19 and deep resentment toward the West were influencing Putin's erratic decision-making in Ukraine.

But Britain's new prime minister, Liz Truss, dismissed Putin's warnings in an interview with Tapper on CNN's "State of the Union" on Sunday.

Truss, who has used a tough stance against Putin as a vehicle to build her own political credibility, almost goaded the Russian president, saying the Ukrainians had been "smarter than him."

She and she warned that the West must continue to "be determined", adding: "We pay no attention to the saber rattling we hear from Putin, and we will continue to support the Ukrainians to the end."

But another European leader who knows Putin well, President Sauli Niinistö of Finland, warned on Sunday of a dangerous moment now that the Russian leader had now invested so much credibility in a war that has turned against him in recent weeks.

"He's gone all in," Niinistö told CNN's Fareed Zakaria.

"He is a fighter, so it is very difficult to see him accepting any kind of defeat and this surely makes the situation very critical."

The inability of Putin, for historical, personal and political reasons, to admit that he failed in Ukraine has brought the world to a potentially dangerous moment.

War in Ukraine Vladimir Putin

Source: cnnespanol

All news articles on 2022-09-26

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