Nuclear Castration of Putin by Beijing

“The most acute period of our military conflict with the West in Ukraine is entering its final stage. We have decided against using our most terrifying weapons to save as many lives as we can among both the civilian population and our valiant military troops.  With that in mind, we have come to the realization that we might not achieve, at least for the time being, the same sort of victory in Ukraine that we did over Napoleon’s army.  That war secured four decades of peace for Europe.  We also don’t envision, for now, a defeat for the West along the lines of that dealt to Hitler’s army.”

This clumsy paragraph appeared on the official Rossiyskaya Gazeta Kremlin website on the morning of Aug. 8  and as yet has largely gone unnoticed both within Russia and throughout the world.

The piece was credited to Sergei Karaganov, long considered to be a pseudonym used by Russian President Vladimir Putin. It is easy to imagine him writing this through gritted teeth as it was most likely extracted under duress – but from whom?

This one-of-a-kind text was published just three days after Putin returned from his visit to Beijing which suggests that the Russian dictator received a strong recommendation to back away from the strategy of nuclear blackmail that has constituted the essence of his entire foreign policy since March 18, 2014. 

In his (in)famous Crimea speech on that day, redolent of Hitler’s comments on the Sudetenland, Putin took the vague, geopolitical complexes and illusions of the collective Russian “elite” and turned them into rigid concepts: a disunited nation, the need to gather ancestral lands, reestablish the Russian World.

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Even the most modest implementation of these ambitions to reclaim ancestral Russian lands would require changing the national borders of at least two NATO member states:  Estonia and Latvia.  And just what tools could a country employ, other than its famous “spirituality,” to successfully engage with the NATO alliance and to annex the territory of two of its members by a country that is clearly inferior to NATO in so many areas:  economic development, science and technology, conventional weapons? 

Putin’s answer was: nuclear weapons, and that’s it.

This despite the well-known fact that Russia and e NATO are at a stalemate when it comes to nuclear weapons according to the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) Surely the nuclear factor ccould be disregarded in any strategic calculation?

The thing is, that’s not entirely true.  In fact, it’s entirely untrue. 

If geopolitical circumstances become dire enough, a nuclear power looking to change the status-quo and possessing exceptional political will, along with a certain amount of recklessness, can achieve substantial foreign policy goals merely by threatening to use nuclear weapons.

The Putin agenda for World War IV, articulated by the man himself on that day in March 2014, did not call for the destruction of the loathsome United States, which truly could have only been achieved via mutual suicide during a full-scale nuclear war.  No, the agenda was much more modest:  a major expansion of the Russian World, a collapse of the NATO alliance, and the discrediting and humiliation of the US as a guarantor of peace in the West.  In short, payback for the USSR’s defeat in World War III (the Cold War) in the same way that World War II was unleashed by Hitler to avenge Germany’s defeat in World War I.

Fast forward eight years to a joint press-conference held on Feb. 9, 2022, when Putin personally issued a nuclear threat – given in highly ungrammatical Russian – to President Macron of France should NATO dare to intervene on behalf of Ukraine. 

“Of course, NATO and Russia’s arsenals are not comparable. We realize that we fall short when it comes to conventional weapons.  But we are also aware that Russia is one of the world’s leading nuclear powers, and that when it comes to certain components of modernity, we are even ahead of many.”

Since Feb. 22, 2022 – the date of his full-scale invasion of Ukraine – top level spewers of Putin’s propaganda (Karaganov, Trenin, Simes), working on Western audience have consistently hammered home that if the West helps Ukraine too much in this conflict, Russia might go to “De-escalation through nuclear escalation.”

Is it not better, therefore, to not get involved,  Strangely enough that strategy worked:  timid Western leaders have refused to intervene decisively and instead placed restrictions on the number and type of weapons that could be shipped to Ukraine along with limitations on their use.  They repeated the same mantra: “under no circumstances can we allow things to escalate.”  

So, just what happened in Beijing?  Why suddenly did such a successful strategy collapse with a humiliating whimper?  Why did Russia’s maniacal nuclear terrorist Karaganov sign a document officially announcing “urbi et orbi” that the country “has decided not to use its most terrifying weapon?”

This sorry excuse for a “Fuhrer” leading this sorry excuse for an empire is evidently “not seeking victory for the time being” in a war which he started.  In other words, he plans to lose it. 

I might have an answer to this fundamental question.  Comrade Xi decided to show both the Global South and the Global West two things:

China’s potential to act as a peacemaker – the laurel wreath of a Nobel Laureate could be beckoning.

The terrifying, uncontrollable Putin is in fact in a state of complete vassal-like submission to him.

Still, I do not have answers to two other minor questions:

Why has Karaganov (whoever he is) not yet shot himself? 

Why have the Z-patriots not yet removed Putin (by shooting or “early” retirement?