Why is Putin afraid of NATO?
Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo says Europe must commit to making NATO “strong” on “One Nation with Brian Kilmeid”.
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According to foreign policy experts, Russian President Vladimir Putin would consider nuclear weapons only if he felt an “existential threat” to his country or regime.
“They can be used, but in very, very specific situations,” former Russian Foreign Minister Andrei Kozyrev told Fox News Digital. “If Russia or any of these countries really threatens their hearts – existentially, that is, if NATO troops come to Moscow, then they will probably resort to nuclear weapons.
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“But in the current circumstances, there is no existential threat to Russia,” Kozyrev said.
Russia has changed course in the last few weeks after failing to take Kyiv despite a month-long campaign in northern Ukraine. The Russian military says it has achieved its first phase goal and will instead focus on securing the Donbass region, a move some have described as a “consolation prize” to compensate for the “victim”.
Brent Sadler, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, has suggested that Putin could use a tactical nuclear strike if Russia faces a “devastating military defeat” in Donbass.
“This may be the case when tactical nuclear weapons can be seen as demonstrating determination and essentially reversing all the trends that are happening in the Russian military,” Sadler said. “I don’t see them using urban assassins, because that would definitely lead to World War III, and if it does, it’s supposed to attack NATO.”
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Putin reiterated his nuclear threats after indications from Finland and Sweden that they could both apply for NATO membership in June, when the current member states meet in Madrid, and Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky said on Sunday that “all countries should be concerned “about Putin and his threats with nuclear weapons.
But Kozyrev, author of “Firebird: The Elusive Fate of Russian Democracy,” said it was an “absolute” case of “barking” with “no way to bite” the Russian leader.
“Responsible military commanders will do everything to avoid such a scenario and prevent the use of nuclear weapons, unless they believe that there is an existential threat to their homeland,” he said.
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Putin sometimes treated NATO’s very existence as an existential threat to Russia, but Kozyrev insisted that as long as Putin could maintain his regime, he would do nothing to jeopardize his position in power.
In this image from a video provided by the press center of the Ukrainian president, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky speaks from Kyiv, Ukraine, April 12, 2022 (Press service of the Ukrainian president through AP)
Part of the difficulty in trying to anticipate Putin’s potential moves is that the West continues to project its own thinking and logic on Moscow, which Sadler said was a “really bad trend” among Western leaders.
“I think Putin has a tendency to mirror the United States,” Sadler said. “With commitment we are getting better and better and the Ukrainian people are helping us to understand better, but there is a real danger there.
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“And now it’s difficult because Putin is largely isolated and only works with a group of highly trusted advisers,” he added, adding that Putin could make unexpected calculations from a Western perspective.
Frederick Kagan, director of the Critical Threats Project at the American Institute of Entrepreneurship, went even further to say that Putin was working in a “limited rationality” that he equated with talking about “explanations in the universe” for movies or TV shows. .
“There is definitely a fictional universe in which Putin operates, and he has explanations in the universe for what he is doing,” Kagan said. “And that’s a problem, because it’s obviously not that he believes everything the Kremlin says, which is complicated by that.”
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Kagan said the United States acted under the same framework during the Cold War and that officials at the time were more aware that the Russians were acting in a different logical way than the West.
“We know this is not the real world – that’s clear: he doesn’t make decisions that are rational in the real world, but we also know that this is not the science fiction universe that the Kremlin is spinning,” Kagan added. “It’s closer to the real world than that, but how close to the real world it’s hard to say.”
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