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While the Kharkiv front freezes, Putin has his nuclear forces once again practice emergency scenarios. The fear is that Russia’s president is just waiting for the right moment.
Moscow – Sergei Karaganov wanted to know whether Russia should hold a “nuclear gun to the West’s temple” in Ukraine. Russian President Vladimir Putin answered the political scientist’s question during the last economic forum in St. Petersburg in the negative, as Reuters reported. Nevertheless, Russia’s nuclear forces are conducting exercises again, as the news agency is currently reporting. The Russian dictator is apparently trying to appease the world and at the same time pose a massive threat. The West is faced with the question of whether Putin is bluffing or to what extent a real danger is looming.
Caution is advised for several reasons, predicts Ulrich Speck in the New Zurich Newspaper. After ReutersAccording to the Russian Defense Ministry, it had carried out or was carrying out exercises with mobile Yars nuclear missile launchers on Friday (5 July): “The ministry announced that the crews of the Yars missile launchers would move in at least two different regions over a distance of 100 kilometres and practice camouflage and deployment,” writes ReutersAbout a month earlier, Russian nuclear forces had already completed the same drills with the same weapons and together with their ally Belarus. These exercises also consisted of moving the units and establishing combat readiness.
“The more successful the Ukrainians are in repelling the Russian invasion, the more likely it is that Putin will threaten – or resort to – using a bomb.”
Similar exercises will be carried out by other missile units in the near future, the Ministry of Defense said, according to Reuters The threat of using tactical or nuclear weapons is seen by the NZZ-Author Speck sees this as fundamental to Russia’s war against Ukraine’s readiness to defend itself. The attempt at intimidation is also aimed at the West’s willingness to support it.
Putin is difficult to assess: The world fears his red lines
“Not every threat is a threat that must be followed by an action. But it can be followed. The problem is that we are moving in a grey area and nobody knows where the red lines are,” says Ulrich Kühn. ZDF wanted to know how realistic Russia’s threats of nuclear weapons are. Like the political scientist from the Institute for Peace Research and Security Policy at the University of Hamburg, other scientists also have to leave the question open. Kühn describes the maneuver itself as not very spectacular, as he told the ZDF expressed to.
Consequences of a nuclear explosion
It takes about ten seconds for the fireball of a nuclear explosion to reach its maximum size. A nuclear explosion releases enormous amounts of energy in the form of pressure, heat and radiation. An enormous shock wave reaches speeds of many hundreds of kilometers per hour.
The explosion kills people near the impact and causes lung injuries, ear damage and internal bleeding further away. People are injured by collapsing buildings and flying objects. The thermal radiation is so intense that it vaporizes almost everything nearby. The extreme heat causes severe burns and ignites widespread fires that coalesce into a huge firestorm. Even people in underground shelters are at risk of death due to lack of oxygen and carbon monoxide poisoning.
The bomb that destroyed Hiroshima and killed around 140,000 people by the end of 1945 with an explosive force of 15 kilotons is the size of one of the smallest weapons in the Russian arsenal.
Source: International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN)
“To be honest, what is happening there is not that exciting,” he said. Russia is apparently testing both its tactical and strategic nuclear weapons. The “Yars” are said to be able to travel 12,000 kilometers. Strategic nuclear weapons are a relic of the Cold War; with them, the two power blocs, the USA and the USSR, were able to shoot at each other directly and destroy each other on a massive scale. According to the Federal Agency for Civic Education These are weapons for “global exchanges of blows” – tactical nuclear weapons, on the other hand, have a smaller-scale effect and were designed for locations such as Europe or Asia.
Talking and acting are two different things: Putin appeases and exercises combat readiness
During the economic forum in St. Petersburg, Vladimir Putin once again made a clear reference to Russia’s nuclear doctrine: “Nuclear weapons may only be used in exceptional cases – when the country’s sovereignty and territorial integrity are threatened, under exceptional circumstances,” he said. And yet Putin stressed that this doctrine is “a living instrument” and that he does not rule out adapting it to the course of the war in Ukraine.
“Our armed forces continue to gain experience and increase their efficiency, while our defense sector continues to demonstrate its capabilities,” Putin said in St. Petersburg. “I have stressed this many times and will say it again: our ammunition production has increased more than 20-fold, our capabilities in aviation technology far exceed those of our opponents, and our superiority in armored vehicles is significant.” He was “firmly convinced,” he stressed, that a nuclear scenario would not occur, “because we do not foresee such a need.”
USA is certain: Putin was already flirting with a nuclear strike in October 2022
However, Putin had repeatedly linked the deviation from his doctrine and thus the renunciation of nuclear strikes to the fact that the Russian heartland would remain free from attacks with Western weapons. The West has already gradually given up this restraint. However, the New York Times At the end of March this year, it was reported that Russian military officials were already flirting with the use of nuclear weapons in the deadlocked war in Ukraine as early as autumn 2022 – the US secret service claims to have learned this from intercepted conversations: “Some conversations were just ‘all kinds of chatter’,” an official told the NYTHowever, other discussions concerned the units responsible for the relocation or stationing of the weapons, the paper reports.
“Most alarming was that one of the highest-ranking Russian military commanders explicitly discussed the logistics of detonating a weapon on the battlefield,” the New York Times wrote. And at the beginning of last year, the magazine The War Zone about a modification of the RS-24-Yars intercontinental ballistic missile, “whose final stage will contain significantly more mobile, independent warheads.” These changes would make it more difficult for enemies to track and intercept the weapon and improve its overall accuracy and performance, the magazine writes.
Jars-24 missiles are being modernized: Crimea could become Putin’s trigger
“While warheads of this type have been tested by Russia in the past, recent evidence suggests that the country is close to beginning mass production of these missiles, which will initially be deployed on road-mobile launch vehicles,” said The War ZoneThe West has been waiting for Putin’s trigger to order the nuclear strike ever since. The recapture of Crimea, for example, could push the world to the brink of catastrophe, it is feared. It is still “90 seconds to midnight,” writes the Science and Security Committee of the US Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and “leaves the hands of his Doomsday Clock unchanged as ominous trends continue to point the world toward global catastrophe,” he writes.
Its authors Hans Kristensen and Matt Korda see Russia in the “final phase of a decades-long modernization of its strategic and non-strategic nuclear forces to replace Soviet-era weapons with newer systems.” The timing of their deployment seems overdue; New York Times had already described the fall of 2022 as “Biden’s Armageddon moment” (“Armageddon” is a biblical term and refers to the “end-time battle”). “It is the nuclear paradox,” said US General Mark A. Milley, according to the New York TimesThe former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff added: “The more successful the Ukrainians are in repelling the Russian invasion, the more likely it is that Putin will threaten – or resort to – using a bomb.”
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