Putin will use the annexation of Kherson, Zaporizhia and Donbas as an alibi for a possible nuclear attack

Its false referendums, without any guarantee and with the military knocking on doors to force the vote, have not yet been recognized by any country, not even for Belarus, which is saying something. India and China, huge states with their own internal tensions, have insisted on the need to respect the territorial integrity of the countries. In fact, that defense of territorial integrity is the basis of China’s international policy and, surely, Xi Jinping He will have raised his hands to his head when he saw Putin’s decision, which isolates him even more from the rest of the planet.

Although for the United Nations and the rest of the civilized world, Russia’s borders will remain as agreed in Minsk in 2015, for Putin and his fans, will now include four new provinces. The movement seems desperate given the current situation of the conflict – the imminent fall of Liman opens the way for the Ukrainian army to Kreminna and Svatove, key cities for the Russians in the occupied Donbas – and provokes a series of consequences of the most varied, some of them, certainly worrying.

[Putin usa la movilización para intentar deshacerse (otra vez) de la minoría tártara de Crimea]

Territorial integrity and its nuclear defense

Starting this Friday, these four provinces will not be pro-Russian territories not sympathetic people’s republics, but an integral part of the Russian Federation itself. This obviously raises a first alarm: since the beginning of the conflict, the Kremlin and its spokesmen have regularly responded to the nuclear threat against the West. The justification, in any case, has been defensive. Such nuclear weapons would not be used to attack Ukraine or any other country, but “to protect Russian territorial integrity.”

How far are you going to take this principle from Friday? For Moscow, Limán is already Russia, as will Kherson or Melitopol or Mariúpol. In principle, attacking any of these cities would be like attacking Kursk or Bolgorod. Now, we know that, this very summer, there were missile attacks on parts of Crimea, including the capital, Sevastopol. Obviously, these attacks were the work of the Ukrainian army, although kyiv never claimed responsibility for them. In Moscow, they preferred not to give it too much publicity and look the other way, despite the panic caused by these attacks among the many vacationers who had to return to Russia frightened.

When it came to referring to the situation, the term “terrorism” was used, a word that the Kremlin constantly uses to define attacks in other subject regions (Chechnya, Ossetia, Transnitria…) both when they are strictly terrorist actions and when they are rather defensive strategies. The key, from now on, and bearing in mind that the war is going to continue and that Ukraine will not respect any false border, will be the consideration that Russia gives to those attacks. It is possible that the “special military operation” will become a “special counter-terrorist operation” and point.

In fact, the fact that they are going to send three hundred thousand recruits to fight a conventional war invites us to think that everything will continue, more or less, as it has been up to now. On the other hand, if Putin wants everything to continue as it is now, why formally annex land that he does not completely control? What, furthermore, are these new frontiers? Do they include all of those regions as administratively divided by Ukraine at the time, or only the occupied part? In the latter case, will they end hostilities and respect the other side of the new border? It seems unlikely.

[Rusia entrena a reservistas en la frontera con Polonia y Lituania en plena crisis del Nord Stream]

A fearsome step into the unknown

What is clear is that this strategic move opens up new and undesirable options. Almost from the beginning of the war, there has been talk of the temptation to use “tactical” nuclear weapons. Russia has been massively buying this type of weapon for years, which can be used in the form of a “dirty bomb” or as the head of a short- or long-distance missile. Its effects are impossible to measure because the range goes from 0.3 kilotons to thirty times that power. The bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki had a yield of sixteen and twenty-one kilotons, respectively. They killed between 130,000 and 250,000 Japanese.

Calculating how many victims a less powerful bomb could cause is absurd. It has never been done and there are too many factors involved. Is Putin going to launch it on the civilian population, on military units, in open places, in closed structures? We have no idea and therefore we do not know the consequences, although we intuit that they would be devastating and would demand a response from NATO that would lead us one way or another into a full-scale nuclear conflict.

Is that what awaits us? Fortunately, it does not seem most likely yet. US intelligence says it has not observed movements of such weapons towards positions near the Ukrainian front lines. Russia does not want to lose the war, but he doesn’t want to disappear either, no matter how much that means the disappearance of some of his enemies. Even in the most conservative scenario – use of a tactical nuclear weapon with no response from NATO or with a conventional response – Moscow would lose the support of India and China immediately. It would be a complete suicide.

Now, the justification is already there. The use of the nuclear arsenal would already enter into an exculpatory narrative. It would no longer be “we are attacking another country” but “we are defending our homeland”. At the moment, everything indicates that the war will continue in the current terms and that what Putin seeks with the partial mobilization is to be able to defend those territories that he has annexed without having to appeal to the unknown. He may serve you. If this is not the case, their delusions and threats will continue. How far he will take them or how far his own army will let him take them is unknown.