MOVING TO FRONT FROM OCTOBER 17, SINCE THE DISCUSSION IN THE COMMENTS CONTINUES--MORE COMMENTS WELCOME
Reader Boris Dagaev calls my attention to this chilling interview at the Financial Times with Alexander Gabuev, who "before he left Russia...was a member of the country’s foreign policy elite as one of Russia’s leading experts on China," and now works for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, DC (previously in Moscow). An excerpt:
I think that if [Putin] believes that he’s losing this war and this war is existential for his understanding of his role in Russian history, we will see real-time preparations [for the use of nuclear weapons]. So he will try not to hide this. And it’s gonna be nuclear warhead-driven direction missile or whatever or artillery shells being unloaded. He will make it visible to give the west time to call him and start negotiation and avoid the nuclear escalation scenario, the way Cuban missile crisis was resolved....
I think that it’s very important to understand that he sees this war as really existential. It’s life and death for Russia. And he also said that we don’t need this world without Russia. It’s a very anti-Russian saying, by the way. I think that our national identity, for at least the educated class, is built on the idea that Russia sacrificed itself and stood in the way of Mongolian hordes, and that allowed European culture to thrive and have a renaissance. And then in World War II, we also sacrificed up to 30 million people. And then the idea is based on self-sacrifice. So to say that we are ready to destroy the world and go down . . .
He goes on to discuss the "refurbishing" of the bunker system in preparation for nuclear war. He also thinks that if Putin uses a tactical nuclear weapon in Ukraine that the U.S. will respond militarily, which would be a disaster. I dearly hope he's wrong about that. I dearly hope someone who has all our fates in their hands will make some intelligent decisions. Anyway, read the whole interview. (And for a somewhat more hopeful account, see this.)
