the finger of Vladimir Putin It has been approaching the nuclear trigger for long weeks. Each Ukrainian victory brings it one millimeter closer.
At this point in the conflict, the Russian president knows that despite the immense numerical superiority, the troops are not his winning card. Lacking motivation, the soldiers of the invading army show little will to fight. The scenes of rampaging have multiplied since the successful Ukrainian offensive in the northeast. And each Russian pushback brings Putin’s finger closer to the nuclear trigger.
Joe Biden used the term that appears in chapter 16 of the Book of Revelation. “Armageddon” alludes to Mount Megiddo, near Nazareth, where the Old Testament says that the final battle between good and evil will take place, which will be an apocalyptic battle. The White House chief said he saw Armageddon closer than ever before in history. In other words, the current danger of nuclear war exceeds that which occurred during the Missile Crisis of 1962.
It sounds tremendous, but it is not a far-fetched analysis. At the beginning of the 60’s, Nikkita Khrushchev installed Soviet missiles in Cuba to force what was proposed in a tense negotiation: that the United States withdraw from Turkey the Jupiter missiles, which could reach Moscow with their atomic warheads in ten minutes. That Soviet leader had no other objective than that and he knew that in the Oval Office there was a sensible leader to negotiate: John Kennedy.
The debates of the National Security Council in which the tough Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara participated, show that Washington estimated that the worst response of the USSR to an attack against Cuba would be the capture of West Berlin, instead of a nuclear offensive. Instead now, the issue is that in the Kremlin there is no chess player on the geostrategic chessboard, but rather a leader accustomed to winning wars who could lose everything if his most unjustifiable act of war fails.
That is why it is possible to say that the world did not come as close to a nuclear war as Putin is doing as his troops retreat in Ukraine. That retreat does not imply that the invading force is weaker. Russia’s military might has nuclear weapons. Many of the warheads in that arsenal are those that Ukraine transferred to Moscow in 1994, under pressure from Moscow, Washington and London, complying with the provisions of the Budapest Memorandum.
By the way, dropping atomic bombs on the Ukraine should not be an option. The most elementary rationality indicates that it would reach, in genocidal cruelty, the nazi concentration camps. But the Russian president does not seem willing to accept the limits imposed by reason. At times he shows signs of preferring mass extermination to his own defeat, or preferring that his defeat turn a good part of Europe into a crater.
His finger approaches nuclear trigger to the rhythm of Ukrainian coups such as the destruction of a section of the strategic Kerch bridge, which connects Russia with Crimea and through which the weapons that supply the invading army transit.
Defeat is not an option for Putin. History shows that every time Russia lost a war, great changes occurred in its political landscape.
In the Crimean War of 1853, the Russian empire, with Greece as an ally, was defeated by the Ottomans supported by France, Great Britain and the Kingdom of Sardinia. That defeat opened the way for Tsar Alexander II and his liberal reforms, the most important since Peter the Great.
That in 1905 the tsar’s fleet was decimated in the naval war with Japan caused the First Russian Revolution, which imposed a constitution and made it possible to establish the State Duma of the Empire. Another defeat that caused transformative earthquakes was that of the Soviet Army in Afghanistan. The triumph of mujahideen on the forces sent by Moscow, opened the way to Glasnost and Perestroika, the reform programs promoted by Mikhail Gorbachev.
The Russian defeat in the first war against Chechen separatism changed the government of the president Boris Yeltsin. The victory of the Caucasian separatists led by General Dudayev over the Russian army began to weaken the management of Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin to the point of sinking the government into a permanent short circuit that made Kirienko, Primakov and Stepashin ephemeral premieres, until Vladimir Putin he took over the position that he used as a launch pad for the presidency.
Victory strengthens regimes that defeat weakens. That is why Ukraine’s strategic victory in the northeast and the advances it is making on the central and southern fronts could weaken the autocratic Russian regime. The Russians had managed to control the entire Kharkiv oblast, but not its capital and second largest and most populous city in Ukraine. But showing signs of preparing an offensive in the south to reconquer the area around Mykolaiv and Zaporizhia, the Ukrainian military managed to fool the high command and launched a counterattack to recapture the north-east of the country.
The Ukrainians also reconquered important cities like Lyman. And although these victories do not mean that the Russian army is defeated or on the verge of defeat, they show that it is possible to defeat it. If that were to happen, the power that Putin built could crumble like a house of cards.
At first, the head of the FSB, Alexander Bortnikov and the first and second of the Security Council, Nikolai Patrushev and Dmitri MedvedevThey will see to it that only Putin falls. But the tremor that would be unleashed could also drag that small nomenklatura of hawks.
The head of the Kremlin knows that his fate is played out in the Ukraine. That is why to each of the Ukrainian advances, he responded by taking steps towards nuclear weapons. In that direction points the annexation of Luhansk, Donestk, Zaporizhia and Kherson, including a reform of the Constitution by decree. From these steps, Ukraine’s advances will imply “attacks within Russia”, the justification that the head of the Kremlin seeks to apply his “final solution”.
Nuclear weapons are the last card, but they are already looming up Putin’s sleeve. He would first use tactical projectiles, which, although they have limited destruction power, would produce mass annihilations and would break the Doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD), pushing NATO to get involved in the same terms. With Putin’s finger approaching the nuclear triggerthe invasion prowls the gates of hell.
