The Kremlin spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, in an interview with Christiane Amanpour on CNN, said that “in the face of a threat to our very existence, the nuclear weapon could be used” by Russia
Pushed insistently by Christiane Amanpour of the CnnEventually Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman, admitted that if it were attacked directly, Russia could be the first to resort to an atomic response: “Faced with a threat to the very existence of our country, the nuclear weapon could be used”. Not a novelty given that Vladimir Putin’s decision to change the Russian military doctrine in 2020 was well known, admitting, in fact, “the first blow”. But certainly, in the midst of Special Military Operation, as they call it, hearing this concept repeated by one of the men closest to the Chief makes my skin crawl. Also because Western scholars have long affirmed that Moscow is also seriously thinking about a limited or “tactical” use, as the technicians say, of small bombs.
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During the interview he granted to CnnPeskov repeated what the Russians have been saying for some time: things are proceeding exactly as planned, it is not true that the Kremlin was thinking of solving the Ukrainian question in two days. Then the usual “fanciful” interpretations of what happens on the ground: in Mariupol the army clears the city of nationalist units “Who use civilians as human shields and kill those who want to leave.”
Then, faced with the repeated question of Christiane Amanpour, the statement on the atomic bomb. “We have a very clear concept of national security.”
The new Russia born after the dissolution of the USSR in 1991 foresaw the use of nuclear power only as a response to an attack carried out with the same weapon. But then Putin changed everything, given that the old conventional superiority of the Warsaw Pact forces no longer exists: on the ground, NATO would defeat Russia. Lately, Russian strategists have also begun to think that the country, if cornered, could have recourse the launch of a single device “to show intent, for the purpose of de-escalation”, as explained by Yevgeny Buzhinskij, a former officer of the General Staff.
But there are also indications that Moscow may be thinking of winning an atomic confrontation limited to the European theater. For this he would have accumulated a thousand non-strategic devices to be launched perhaps with hypersonic rockets that would not be stopped by the European defenses. And the possibility of a “mistaken” start is not so remote today, according to American experts. With much of its army locked in Ukraine, Russia could see NATO’s strengthening these days in the countries that were part of the Soviet empire as a threat.
March 23, 2022 (change March 23, 2022 | 10:45 am)
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