May 03, 2013
This week's selection of magazine covers from around the world.
This week's selection of magazine covers from around the world.
The risk of the Kremlin launching a tactical nuclear weapon on Ukraine is small but not impossible. The Western response would itself set off a counter-response, which might contain or spiral to the worst-case scenario.
An anti-nuclear activist impersonates Vladimir Putin at a rally in Berlin.
-Analysis-
PARIS — Vladimir Putin could “go nuclear” in Ukraine. Yes, this expression, which metaphorically means “taking the extreme, drastic action,” is now literally considered a possibility as well. Cornered and humiliated by a now plausible military defeat, experts say the Kremlin could launch a tactical nuclear bomb on a Ukrainian site in a desperate attempt to turn the tables.
Stay up-to-date with the latest on the Russia-Ukraine war, with our exclusive international coverage.
Sign up to our free daily newsletter.In any case, this is what Putin — who put Russia's nuclear forces on alert just after the start of the invasion in late February — is aiming to achieve: to terrorize populations in Western countries to push their leaders to let go of Ukraine.
Even if tactical nuclear bombs are less powerful than Hiroshima (15 kilotons of TNT, a thousand times less powerful than strategic bombs capable of erasing cities), they are still nuclear. Their use would trigger a spiral that could result in the annihilation of humanity.
Most believe that the Kremlin is bluffing, but many also thought he would never invade Ukraine either: “A Russian nuclear hit is not very probable but we must prepare ourselves to every possibility,” says Admiral Jean-Louis Lozier, an expert at the French Institute of International Relations.
But the bluff is not working for the moment, as the West is continuing to supply Ukraine with heavy artillery.
And so what would happen if Putin were to press the button? Let’s think the unthinkable, which is not so unthinkable after all, since he was only a hair's breadth away from setting off nuclear fire on at least three occasions already.
The Russian president presses the red button (which does not exist by the way, instead it is in fact the activation of a code with the help of a bag nicknamed "Tcheget"), to launch a bomb of 2 kilotons on Ukraine.
He would then likely obtain the immediate surrender of Kyiv. How can one imagine that soldiers, as brave as they may be, continue to fight against an adversary determined to kill 40,000 fighters and civilians with just one missile? Not to mention the panic caused by the deadly radiation. This is what led Japan to surrender in only a few hours in August 1945.
All Ukrainians fearing execution by the occupier, not to mention all those refusing to live under Russian authorities, would take the road of exile, which would then lead to 10 to 15 million Ukrainian refugees in Europe overnight.
The war in Ukraine will not be over any time soon. Wherever the Russian army is deployed the war will only change its nature with "behind every window a babushka armed with a Kalash," as the Ukrainians say. Not to mention the thousands of anti-tank and anti-helicopter missiles supplied by the West that have not yet been used.
Years of guerrilla warfare, worst than in Afghanistan, are in perspective.
After the shock wears off, the international community would need incredibly strong nerves. “The West cannot stay arms crossed” in front of such crimes, says the admiral: “new economic or diplomatic sanctions alone seem inadequate and a military response would therefore be necessary, for example by destroying the Russian surface fleet. But without resorting to nuclear weapons or touching Russian nuclear infrastructure, because that would cause an uncontrollable escalation.”
Retaliating, even in a conventional and limited manner, could however push Vladimir Putin, who has just shown that he does not back down from anything, to outbid a NATO country with nuclear weapons.
It would be a disruption of the nuclear 'grammar'.
The ostentatious alerting of the nuclear forces and interception batteries of all the countries of the Alliance would perhaps not be enough to dissuade him. At the very least, conventional hits from NATO would almost inevitably provoke Russian responses of the same order: put simply, a classic NATO-Russia war, a nightmare since the establishment of the Iron Curtain.
A replica of an AN602 hydrogen bomb, the most powerful nuclear weapon ever created and tested, was shown at an exhibition celebrating the Russian nuclear industry in Moscow in 2015.
Retaliating would thus be risky, but not doing so would undoubtedly constitute an equivalent risk, simply postponed. Indeed, if Russia could bring Ukraine to its knees with impunity, it would no longer make tactical missiles a tool of defensive deterrence, but an instrument of offensive coercion.
It would be a disruption of the nuclear “grammar,” explains Peter Rosen, professor in military affairs at Harvard University, “which would give ideas” to China, North Korea, or other “mini Putins”, not to mention those who, in order to avoid the fate of Kyiv, would hurriedly gather up their arsenal: Taiwan, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Egypt, South Korea and even Vietnam, Algeria, Morocco, and so on. Eventually this would add up to fifty nuclear powers in the world?
Using an atomic bomb at his convenience against a peaceful neighbor, almost as if it were an ordinary weapon, “Russia would be destroying a keystone of the world security order," sums up Malcolm Davis, a member of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute: the Nagasaki taboo that has prevented its use since August 1945.
A universal repulsion would follow this destabilizing planetary action making Russia a pariah state for years, even decades. Even the currently neutral African and Asian countries would be forced to cut ties. China too — furious at seeing the world stability shattered, compromising its prosperity. The last countries, currently less than a dozen, still handling regular air links with Moscow, would likely suspend them.
Russia would be destroying a keystone of the world security order: the Nagasaki taboo that has prevented its use since August 1945.
In addition to seeing a resolution voted against it at the UN by 190 countries over 193, Russia would no longer be able to sell its hydrocarbons because of the reputational risk, or sanctions against its customers, the West, which accounts for 45% of world GDP. As these sales provide the majority of its foreign currency revenue, this would result (in addition to a surge in international prices of black gold) in a vertiginous fall in the standard Russian cost of living and the bankruptcy of their state.
It's all enough to make the Kremlin hesitate, to say the least. One can try to reassure themselves by remembering that the Russian nuclear code is, it seems (a certain secret surrounds the procedure obviously) shared among three people, Vladimir Putin would need the consent of his Minister of Defense, Sergei Shoigu, and Chief of Staff Valery (Vasilyevich) Guerasimov. Insiders consider both, despite close ties to the Kremlin leader, to be "reasonable" men.
The risk of the Kremlin launching a tactical nuclear weapon on Ukraine is small but not impossible. The Western response would itself set off a counter-response, which might contain or spiral to the worst-case scenario.
As a psychoanalyst, Wolfgang Schmidbauer has researched the psychological effects of war on children — and in the process, also examined his own post-War childhood in Germany. In this article, he warns that parents tend to use their experiences of suffering as a method of education, with serious consequences.
Vladimir Putin had planned to roll through Ukraine and splinter the West. While it has not gone according to plan, the destruction and uncertainty left in the path of the invasion has shaken the world.
Central to the tragic absurdity of this war is the question of language. Vladimir Putin has repeated that protecting ethnic Russians and the Russian-speaking populations of Ukraine was a driving motivation for his invasion.
Yet one month on, a quick look at the map shows that many of the worst-hit cities are those where Russian is the predominant language: Kharkiv, Odesa, Kherson.
Then there is Mariupol, under siege and symbol of Putin’s cruelty. In the largest city on the Azov Sea, with a population of half a million people, Ukrainians make up slightly less than half of the city's population, and Mariupol's second-largest national ethnicity is Russians. As of 2001, when the last census was conducted, 89.5% of the city's population identified Russian as their mother tongue.
Between 2018 and 2019, I spent several months in Mariupol. It is a rugged but beautiful city dotted with Soviet-era architecture, featuring wide avenues and hillside parks, and an extensive industrial zone stretching along the shoreline. There was a vibrant youth culture and art scene, with students developing projects to turn their city into a regional cultural center with an international photography festival.
There were also many offices of international NGOs and human rights organizations, a consequence of the fact that Mariupol was the last major city before entering the occupied zone of Donbas. Many natives of the contested regions of Luhansk and Donetsk had moved there, taking jobs in restaurants and hospitals. I had fond memories of the welcoming from locals who were quicker to smile than in some other parts of Ukraine. All of this is gone.
Putin is bombing the very people he has claimed to want to rescue.
According to the latest data from the local authorities, 80% of the port city has been destroyed by Russian bombs, artillery fire and missile attacks, with particularly egregious targeting of civilians, including a maternity hospital, a theater where more than 1,000 people had taken shelter and a school where some 400 others were hiding.
The official civilian death toll of Mariupol is estimated at more than 3,000. There are no language or ethnic-based statistics of the victims, but it’s likely the majority were Russian speakers.
So let’s be clear, Putin is bombing the very people he has claimed to want to rescue.
Putin’s Public Enemy No. 1, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, is a mother-tongue Russian speaker who’d made a successful acting and comedy career in Russian-language broadcasting, having extensively toured Russian cities for years.
Rescuers carry a person injured during a shelling by Russian troops of Kharkiv, northeastern Ukraine.
Yes, the official language of Ukraine is Ukrainian, and a 2019 law aimed to ensure that it is used in public discourse, but no one has ever sought to abolish the Russian language in everyday life. In none of the cities that are now being bombed by the Russian army to supposedly liberate them has the Russian language been suppressed or have the Russian-speaking population been discriminated against.
Sociologist Mikhail Mishchenko explains that studies have found that the vast majority of Ukrainians don’t consider language a political issue. For reasons of history, culture and the similarities of the two languages, Ukraine is effectively a bilingual nation.
"The overwhelming majority of the population speaks both languages, Russian and Ukrainian,” Mishchenko explains. “Those who say they understand Russian poorly and have difficulty communicating in it are just over 4% percent. Approximately the same number of people say the same about Ukrainian.”
In general, there is no problem of communication and understanding. Often there will be conversations where one person speaks Ukrainian, and the other responds in Russian. Geographically, the Russian language is more dominant in the eastern and central parts of Ukraine, and Ukrainian in the west.
Like most central Ukrainians I am perfectly bilingual: for me, Ukrainian and Russian are both native languages that I have used since childhood in Kyiv. My generation grew up on Russian rock, post-Soviet cinema, and translations of foreign literature into Russian. I communicate in Russian with my sister, and with my mother and daughter in Ukrainian. I write professionally in three languages: Ukrainian, Russian and English, and can also speak Polish, French, and a bit Japanese. My mother taught me that the more languages I know the more human I am.
At the same time, I am not Russian — nor British or Polish. I am Ukrainian. Ours is a nation with a long history and culture of its own, which has always included a multi-ethnic population: Russians, Belarusians, Moldovans, Crimean Tatars, Bulgarians, Romanians, Hungarians, Poles, Jews, Greeks. We all, they all, have found our place on Ukrainian soil. We speak different languages, pray in different churches, we have different traditions, clothes, and cuisine.
My mother taught me that the more languages I know the more human I am.
Like in other countries, these differences have been the source of conflict in our past. But it is who we are and will always be, and real progress has been made over the past three decades to embrace our multitudes. Our Jewish, Russian-speaking president is the most visible proof of that — and is in fact part of what our soldiers are fighting for.
Many in Moscow were convinced that Russian troops would be welcomed in Ukraine as liberating heroes by Russian speakers. Instead, young soldiers are forced to shoot at people who scream in their native language.
Starving people ina street of Kharkiv in 1933, during the famine
Diocesan Archive of Vienna (Diözesanarchiv Wien)/BA Innitzer
Putin has tried to rally the troops by warning that in Ukraine a “genocide” of ethnic Russians is being carried out by a government that must be “de-nazified.”
These are, of course, words with specific definitions that carry the full weight of history. The Ukrainian people know what genocide is not from books. In my hometown of Kyiv, German soldiers massacred Jews en masse. My grandfather survived the Buchenwald concentration camp, liberated by the U.S. army. My great-grandmother, who died at the age of 95, survived the 1932-33 famine when the Red Army carried out the genocide of the Ukrainian middle class, and her sister disappeared in the camps of Siberia, convicted for defying rationing to try to feed her children during the famine.
On Tuesday, came a notable report of one of the latest civilian deaths in the besieged Russian-speaking city of Kharkiv: a 96-year-old had been killed when shelling hit his apartment building. The victim’s name was Boris Romanchenko; he had survived Buchenwald and two other Nazi concentration camps during World War II. As President Zelensky noted: Hitler didn’t manage to kill him, but Putin did.
Genocide has returned to Ukraine, from Kharkiv to Kherson to Mariupol, as Vladimir Putin had warned. But it is his own genocide against the Russian-speaking population of Ukraine.