They are openly talking about nuclear war
On a nightly talk show this week, one of the Kremlin’s top propagandists decided to quote Vladimir Putin.
“We’ll go to heaven, and they’ll simply die off,” said Vladimir Solovyov, a TV presenter known for his anti-Western polemics.
Solovyov was repeating a remark that Putin himself made in 2018, about nuclear war, in which the Russian president said that his country would go to heaven, as martyrs.
Solovyov, however, was focused on the war in Ukraine. He was responding to Margarita Simonyan, editor-in-chief of RT, who framed the war’s progress as: “either we lose in Ukraine, or World War Three starts.”
“I personally think that World War Three is more realistic, because knowing us and our leader Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, the most improbable outcome – a nuclear strike – seems more likely than the other course of events,” she added.
The exchange comes as prominent Russians increasingly express frustration with the course of the war, and as some hawks call for Putin to intensify the war effort.
Though the Kremlin zealously arrests those who criticize Putin for deciding to invade Ukraine, those who argue for more aggressive approaches or who scold the Russian government for supposed weakness are largely left alone.
One Russian-language video that recently went viral featured a former Special Forces officer asking: “Dear Vladimir Vladimirovich [Putin], please decide: are we fighting a war? Or are we masturbating?” A Friday Telegram post, written by embedded Russian war correspondent Aleksandr Sladkov, sarcastically remarked on the heroism of the country’s troops, adding that “one man’s heroism is the result of another’s errors.”
Russia abandoned its effort to take Kyiv and Ukraine’s north at the end of last month, with officials saying that the country would focus on the Donbas, in Ukraine’s east. But even that effort appears to have gone far slower than expected, as relatively small gains are coupled with reports of big losses.
Instead of chastening the war’s supporters, however, these setbacks appear to have further energized them. As a result, increasingly vocal Western assessments warn Putin may soon decide to expand the scope of the war by ordering mass mobilization of Russians to augment current force levels.
Some expert observers think that Putin may use the May 9th WW2 Victory holiday to declare full scale war against “Nazis” as opposed to what he now calls a “special military operation.” This would allow the government to institute a draft.
Igor Girkin, a former FSB colonel who took part in Russia’s 2014 campaign in Ukraine but has been on the outs since then, has repeatedly called for a formal declaration of war and for mass mobilization. That, he has said, would give commanders the legal authority to imprison soldiers who refuse to fight, and for the military to conscript Russians en masse for the fight.
“Mobilization is a question of time,” Girkin said in a video released last week, in which he described Ukrainian soldiers as having been “zombified” by the West.
Girkin, who also goes by Strelkov, added that there was nothing to stop the Russian government from turning its peacetime population into soldiers.
“Why can’t an office manager become an infantryman after the minimum, two weeks of training?” he asked, rhetorically. “Some of them so easily go skiing, go diving – they’re as healthy as bulls. Why can’t they be an infantryman, or put shells into a cannon, or drive gas trucks?”
Here’s more from the Daily Beast’s Julia Davis who monitors Russian TV:
During Tuesday’s broadcast of 60 Minutes, Vladimir Avatkov of Russia’s Diplomatic Academy of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs delivered an Orwellian perspective of current events. “What is happening right now is not about Ukraine, but about the future world order, which has no room for hegemony and where Russia can’t be isolated.”
Host Olga Skabeeva described a summit hosted by the U.S. in Germany that day to discuss upping Ukraine’s defense capabilities as a sign that this is indeed “World War III, no longer just a special operation, with 40 countries against us. They declared a war.” Portraying global opponents of Russian aggression as evil incarnate, political scientist Mikhail Markelov claimed: “The representatives of those 40 different countries are today’s collective Hitler.”“We’re all going to die someday.”
Later the same day, on The Evening With Vladimir Solovyov, host Vladimir Solovyov lamented the West’s refusal to heed the Kremlin’s warnings. “If they decide to support Ukraine—even though [Russia’s Foreign Minister] Sergey Lavrov told them that this could lead to WWIII—nothing will stop them. They’ve decided to play it big… These are the bastards with no morals.” Head of RT Margarita Simonyan added: “Personally, I think that the most realistic way is the way of World War III, based on knowing us and our leader, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, knowing how everything works around here, it’s impossible—there is no chance—that we will give up.”
In perhaps the most shocking declaration about a nuclear holocaust delivered on Russian television in recent months, Simonyan concluded that the idea “that everything will end with a nuclear strike, to me, is more probable than the other outcome. This is to my horror, on one hand, but on the other hand, with the understanding that it is what it is.” Solovyov chimed in: “But we will go to heaven, while they will simply croak.” Simonyan comforted the audiences by adding: “We’re all going to die someday.”
Once the conversation turned to Western arms deliveries to Ukraine and a series of fires and explosions on Russian territory, Solovyov pondered out loud: “What is preventing us from striking the territory of the United Kingdom, targeting those logistical centers where these arms are being loaded?” Andrey Sidorov, deputy dean of world politics at Moscow State University, retorted that rather than strike the U.K., Russia should target the real mastermind: America. He specified: “If we decide to strike the U.K., we should rather decide to strike the United States… Final decisions are being made not in London, but in Washington. If we want to hit the real center of the West, then we need to strike Washington.”
There’s more at the link and it’s very unnerving. All it’s going to take is one misstep by an errant pilot or Putin waking up on the wrong side of the bed for this to hurtle out of control.
We’re watching this whole thing like it’s a movie. It’s not a movie.