Because Putin’s nuclear announcement is just a bluff. Speak Margelletti (Cesi)
Putin's announcement on nuclear power commented by Andrea Margelletti, analyst of military and geopolitical issues, president of the Center for international studies, interviewed by La Stampa
Putin and nuclear power: what will he really do?
For days Andrea Margelletti, analyst of military and geopolitical issues, president of the International Studies Center, had been announcing that Putin would invade Ukraine. His analyzes, he is keen to say, are characterized by a healthy realism. Better: of the darkest pessimism. And yet now that Putin raises the nuclear threat, Margelletti does not believe it: «Pure propaganda. And I'll explain why ».
"First of all, a premise. From a military point of view, what President Putin announces with so much fanfare is nonsense. Nuclear weapons, both American and Russian, are always on maximum alert. There is really nothing to increase. In the silos where there are nuclear-armed intercontinental missiles, both US and Russian ones, there are permanently officers able to press the button in three minutes and the missiles arrive at their destination in thirty. The same happens with submarines, perpetually in motion, always ready to strike ».
We had forgotten a little: the principle of nuclear deterrence.
"Precisely. The atomic weapon of one guarantees that of the other. It is the balance of terror. That speech, however, is rather disturbing in itself. It tells us that Putin is ready for choices that our Western conscience cannot even imagine. Choices that repel us. And he tells us how furious he is. Because it must be said loud and clear that the Ukrainians are humiliating the Russian invader. It was supposed to be a blitzkrieg. The generals had promised Putin to win in two days. Instead, the Ukrainians are making the best use of the anti-aircraft missiles and anti-tank rockets of the West. Weapons that hurt badly. There are images of entire Russian armored columns being destroyed, gutted. The Russians are demonstrating incredible operational poverty: their planes and tanks do not coordinate. The armored columns wander unprotected from the sky. It is clear, however, that the Ukrainians were convinced that the invasion would come and they prepared themselves properly ».
And now?
«The fury of a tyrant who was convinced that he was going down in history as a Julius Caesar and who finds himself reduced to the Charlie Chaplin of the Great Dictator can lead to irrational, imponderable decisions. He is now convinced that he has been betrayed by his generals. But we know that with dictators it is always like this: they do not like bad news, they are capable of making a general pass for arms who tells them the naked truth, about the unpreparedness of the armed forces for example, and so they only told him that. that he wanted to hear. At this point it could attack the Baltics. Or it could order carpet bombing of Ukrainian cities to force President Zelensky to surrender in order to save his people. We are leaving the sphere of rational analyzes ».
Will we see house-to-house fights?
“That's what the Russians have been avoiding so far. Not out of a humanitarian spirit, but because they preserve a religious memory of Stalingrad. And they remember well the lesson of Grozny, the capital of Chechnya, when the Islamic militiamen inflicted heavy losses on them and were forced to raze the city to the ground. Only that Ukraine had to be another story: a sister nation returning to their side ».
(Extract from an interview published by the newspaper La Stampa; here the full version)
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/perche-lannuncio-di-putin-sul-nucleare-e-solo-un-bluff-parla-margelletti-cesi/ on Mon, 28 Feb 2022 11:34:04 +0000.