Will the Russians use tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine?
Until a few days ago, I regularly dismissed as utterly fanciful and propagandistic in intent all suggestions in Western media that Russia might deploy nuclear weapons in their ongoing war on Ukraine. The notion was put forward by Washington in support of the narrative that Russia was losing the war and could ‘go nuclear’ to prevent a disgraceful defeat.
To be sure, there were along the way certain identified threats posed by Kiev to introduce a nuclear dimension to the conflict by creating a ‘dirty bomb’ for use against territory occupied by the Russians, both to kill the enemy and to render the land contaminated for generations. There were the repeated threats to the Zaporozhye nuclear plant being held and operated by the Russians, where vast quantities of spent fuel was stored, all of it capable of causing havoc if struck by missiles or artillery fire. There were the depleted uranium artillery shells that Britain and the United States had shipped to Kiev, despite their use being proscribed by international bodies and despite the threat of contamination wherever they were fired. However, none of these threats was realized by the Kiev regime and it appeared that Russia was doing very well in subduing the Ukr-Nazis by purely conventional arms.
Against this background I paid full attention to a report from the field that was aired on a Vesti news program of Russian state television about three days ago. What I heard was a seemingly casual remark by a Russian soldier manning a new, relatively small and maneuverable artillery piece with 17 km firing range that he said ‘could accept nuclear charges.’ That was absolutely the first time I have heard Russians speak of tactical nuclear weapons since the war began. It is unthinkable that this remark was spontaneous and had not been cleared in advance by the senior editors, of whom Dmitry Kiselyov is the top boss.
Now why would the Russians themselves raise the issue of their vast capabilities in tactical nuclear weapons? Why do it now, when even mainstream Western media acknowledge that the Russians hold the upper hand in the fight and that time is on their side?
I venture to say that the Kremlin had received intelligence reports of some dastardly American plan to interrupt the natural course of events in this war if only to save face and keep alive Joe Biden's chances of re-election. With this discrete remark on a news show that American intelligence would be sure to pick up, the Russians were putting them on notice that two sides can play dirty, if it comes to that.
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Otherwise, these closing weeks of December the Kremlin has been saturating television programming with military news. Yesterday, for the second time in a month, Putin oversaw via video link the launch of the latest generation naval vessels at the Northern Wharf shipyard in Petersburg. These three boats which had passed their sea trials are relatively small in outer dimensions and displacement but pack a mighty punch from long range cruise missiles that proved their worth six years ago in the Syrian war or from today’s latest hypersonic missiles. On the occasion, Defense Minister Shoigu mentioned that a total of 50 new vessels are in various stages of construction and completion for the Russian navy.
And yesterday Shoigu reported to Putin on the conquest of Mariinka, a town 5 kilometers distant from Donetsk city, the capital of the Donbas oblast of the same name that has been the object of a struggle for control since the very start of the Special Military Operation. The significance of Mariinka is that it was one of the most heavily fortified outposts of the Ukrainian forces and that it was sending artillery and missile strikes on Donetsk city on a daily basis this whole time, causing great damage and loss of civilian lives. That the conquest took so long attests to the determination of the Russian military leadership to minimize loss of personnel in ‘storm’ operations. The fortifications were largely destroyed by artillery fire before the Russians entered and took the city building by building.
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Somehow the reality of fast growing Russian strength in terms of industrial output of the military industrial complex and in terms of position on the ground in the war zone is simply not understood or is ignored by opinion leaders in the United States in what I would call ‘enlightened circles.’ None are more ‘enlightened,’ none enjoy greater respect for their supposed reasonableness than Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor and publisher of The Nation magazine or Anatol Lieven, Senior Fellow of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. In the past week, both have come out with calls for peace negotiations to end the Ukraine war based on the premise, patently false, that neither of the warring parties is capable of breaking what is considered to be an impasse and achieving its war aims in full.
Part of the problem these authors have is that they impute to Russia war aims that are not at all what Russia was seeking at the outset or is seeking today. Swallowing up the whole of Ukraine, the realization of some imperial drive for territorial control was never a Russian objective. This was attributed to Russia by Western propagandists to serve their own purposes.
From the outset and to this very day, as emphasized by Vladimir Putin in his Direct Line dialogue with the nation a week ago, Russia has sought denazification, demilitarization and neutrality as the outcome of this military engagement. To this triad, demilitarization is, of course, the element which enables the other two, and demilitarization, measured by the destruction of Ukrainian soldiers and materiel, is proceeding very nicely, thank you.
Those who say in Western media that Putin does not really mean what he says, that he is in fact amenable to starting peace talks right now, do not know what they are talking about. Russia is a democracy after its own model, but a democracy and not a dictatorship. The leader cannot abandon what he has been saying with great determination up to the present moment and head off in a totally new direction without consulting with the elites in and out of government, all of which takes a lot of time.
Under these circumstances, it would be highly appropriate if our ‘enlightened’ commentators just shut up about the Russia-Ukraine war and turned their attention to domestic American affairs such as how and why the country is turning into a ‘banana republic’ before our eyes, with the two leading contenders for the presidency in 2024 both fighting on to avoid spending the rest of their days in prison as a result of court cases which are or soon may be brought against them.
©Gilbert Doctorow, 2023