simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Tuesday, 03-Oct-2023 10:50:56 JST
-
Embed this notice
simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Tuesday, 03-Oct-2023 10:50:56 JST simsa03 Sergei A. Karaganov, "A Difficult but Necessary Decision" (June 2023) https://eng.globalaffairs.ru/articles/a-difficult-but-necessary-decision/
[Author profile: Sergei A. Karaganov, DSc (History), Head of the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy, Russia, Dean at Moscow economic university]
If you want to know what some in the foreign policy circles of Russia think about preemptive nuclear strikes to force "the West" to back down in "its war" on Russia. The derangement displayed is outright scary but needs to be taken seriously.
This article is an indication that today's deliberations about the use of nuclear weapons seem to depart from Cold War assessments of MAD. Instead, the localized use of tactical nuclear weapons without that leading to a global confrontation appears possible to some, even reasonable.
« Perhaps the worst situation may occur if, at the cost of enormous losses, we liberate the whole of Ukraine and remain in ruins with a population that mostly hates us. Its “redemption” will take more than a decade. Any option, especially the latter one, will distract our country from making an urgently needed step to shift its spiritual, economic, and military-political focus to the east of Eurasia. We will get stuck in the west, with no prospects in the foreseeable future, while present-day Ukraine, primarily its central and western regions, will sap managerial, human, and financial resources out the country. These regions were heavily subsidized even in Soviet times. The feud with the West will continue as it will support a low-grade guerrilla civil war.
A more attractive option would be liberating and reincorporating the East and the South of Ukraine, and forcing the rest to surrender, followed by complete demilitarization and the creation of a friendly buffer state. But this would be possible only if and when we are able to break the West’s will to incite and support the Kiev junta, and to force it to retreat strategically. [...]
What is being decided on the battlefields in Ukraine is not only, and not so much, what Russia and the future world order will look like, but mainly whether there will be any world at all or the planet will turn into radioactive ruins poisoning the remains of humanity.
By breaking the West’s will to continue the aggression, we will not only save ourselves and finally free the world from the five-century-long Western yoke, but we will also save humanity. By pushing the West towards a catharsis and thus its elites towards abandoning their striving for hegemony, we will force them to back down before a global catastrophe occurs, thus avoiding it. Humanity will get a new chance for development. [...]
And this brings me to the most difficult part of this article. We can keep fighting for another year, or two, or three, sacrificing thousands and thousands of our best men and grinding down tens and hundreds of thousands of people who live in the territories that is now called Ukraine and who have fallen into the tragic historical trap. But this military operation cannot end with a decisive victory without forcing the West to retreat strategically, or even surrender, and compelling it to give up attempts to reverse history and preserve global dominance, and to focus on itself and its current multilevel crisis. Roughly speaking, it must “buzz off” so that Russia and the world could move forward unhindered.
Therefore, it is necessary to arouse the instinct of self-preservation that the West has lost and convince it that its attempts to wear Russia out by arming Ukrainians are counterproductive for the West itself. We will have to make nuclear deterrence a convincing argument again by lowering the threshold for the use of nuclear weapons set unacceptably high, and by rapidly but prudently moving up the deterrence-escalation ladder. The first steps have already been made by the relevant statements of Russian President and other leaders: the announced deployment of nuclear weapons and their carriers in Belarus, and the increased combat readiness of strategic deterrence forces. But there are many steps on this ladder. I have counted about two dozen. Thing may also get to the point when we will have to urge our compatriots and all people of goodwill to leave their places of residence near facilities that may become targets for strikes in countries that provide direct support to the puppet regime in Kiev. The enemy must know that we are ready to deliver a preemptive strike in retaliation for all of its current and past acts of aggression in order to prevent a slide into global thermonuclear war. »
#Ukraine