Sometimes Russia looks like that despues de in which an aggressive drunk is constantly threatening the crowd to pull out a knife or a gun or who knows. Meat of stray. Everyone knows that he will come with his threats and everyone knows that nothing will happen in the end… but, of course, we are human and fear is free. When we hear about the end of the world, we tremble and fear for ourselves and our families. We need some time to remember that this is nothing more than a coordinated propaganda strategy.
And it is that the nuclear rhetoric has been there since the beginning of the war. It is true that sheer wear and tear is no longer as intimidating as before, but it always provokes a certain respect. Vladimir Putin has talked about nuclear weapons, Shoigu has done it, Lavrov has done itThis has been done repeatedly by public television propagandists and, more than anyone, by Dimitri Medvedev, former prime minister and former president of the Russian Federation when the constitution prevented Putin from renewing his mandate. Article that was immediately modified, of course.
It doesn’t seem like threatening a nuclear attack – it’s never really “an attack”, it’s a nuclear war that will end the world – is having great results: The West continues to support Ukraine as much as it can, both military and economically.; Finland, a country with which it shares hundreds of kilometers of border, has entered NATO, and Sweden is only waiting for Turkey’s incomprehensible veto to do the same. China has reminded him several times that you don’t play with these things and not even Kim Jong-Un has signed up for the atomic party.
[Lukashenko: “Nunca hemos estado tan cerca de una guerra mundial. Si Rusia se cae, moriremos”]
few political effects
In short, the ‘Armageddon’ chant is not yielding any political results. Another thing, as we said, is its usefulness in terms of propaganda. Russia, the country that couldn’t stand up to even a group of paramilitaries when they got serious, He has been playing for sixteen months that they are not at war with Ukraine -it’s just a ‘special military operation’- but NATO is at war with them. This means that its propagandists have a gold mine to bring out their anti-Americanism and the one that is still latent in many Western societies.
The argument “Biden is going to lead us to a nuclear war” or “NATO only seeks confrontation and then what happens” falls on the electorate… or so they want to believe in Moscow. Of course, it is permeating certain spheres of the Republican Party and, without going any further, in our country’s government partners. The idea is that this public opinion ends up pressing for a “negotiation” or a “peace”. or any of that series of euphemisms that only hide the desire to please Russia or, at least, get it out of the immense mess it has gotten itself into.
The Vice President of the Russian Security Council, Dmitry Medvedev, with Putin.
A mess that can only grow, seeing the weakness shown on the battlefield and his lack of diplomatic ability to find allies. That is why, regularly, the hackneyed threat of the apocalypse returns. Given the imminence of the NATO summit, to be held next week in Lithuania, a country neighboring Russia, it is logical that these crazy speeches return to the front line. And even more logical is that the person in charge of continuing to whisper inconsistencies is the aforementioned Medvedev.
Russian “living space”
In an opinion piece published on Monday, Medvedev went round and round about the concept of nuclear war, making it clear that the West had no choice but to cave in to Russia. “If our existential problem is not solved, Armageddon is likely,” Medvedev wrote. in relation to the situation of your country on the international scene and, specifically, its need to expand westward. The same need that German nationalists felt to gain a foothold to the east at the turn of the century, which led to the rise of the Nazi Party and the outbreak of World War II. They called it “living space.”
[Putin aplaude el desarrollo de armamento moderno y advierte que desplegará más armas nucleares]
Actually, Russia’s “existential problem” is that it needs to be an empire and they won’t let it. For this reason, according to Medvedev, the West must negotiate with them a “new world order”, which, it seems, would be nothing more than a return to the world order of the cold war: a division by blocs in which the United States and Europe would have its zone of influence, Russia would return to the borders of the USSR and would exercise its dominance over Eastern Europe, and China would do a little whatever it wanted in the Pacific, which is an allied country for that.
The problem for Russia is that this has already happened and it did not go well for them. Basically, because it was Russia itself that imploded, as it was about to implode ten days ago. It will not happen again, no matter how much Medvedev insists that they are willing to continue fighting for decades. The only reason why NATO is moving ever closer to your borders is simply because their neighboring countries believe they need protection. Seeing what has happened with Ukraine, they do not seem to be going wrong.
Vice President of the Russian Security Council Medvedev visits China
The “nuclear taboo”
Medvedev is a man known in Russia for his alcohol problems. Putin’s ability to surround himself with unusual people also says a lot about the Russian president. His essay is generally unreadable and repetitive, and he adds an absolutely incomprehensible phrase: “the nuclear taboo is broken.” Not even the experts Institute for the Study of War they managed to understand in his last report what Medvedev was referring to. No one has used nuclear weapons, strategic or tactical, in the last 78 years.. So you are talking about Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
If that is the case, the nuclear taboo would never have existed. Medvedev would be appealing to a continuity between 1945 and 2013, ignoring that in between there has been decades and decades of Mutual Assured Destruction policies, non-proliferation treaties and international organizations for the control of atomic arsenals. Of course the nuclear taboo is still active. Otherwise, one would think that Russia would have gone from words to action in Ukraine or the USSR would have done it in Afghanistan or the United States would have done it in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq…
[Putin baraja “varios planes” y se pregunta si Rusia debería lanzarse otra vez a conquistar Kiev]
Armageddon can come in handy if you have such a horrible hangover that you can’t even control your body. Perhaps that is the case for Medvedev. The rest of humanity is just interested, starting with Russia -“the Russians love their children too”, Sting sang in the eighties- and of course for China, which has already had to call out the Kremlin for its rhetoric several times. As far as the West is concerned, for now, the ranks remain tight. Every threat meets a wall of unity that leaves few cracks. Only the US presidential election in 2024 could change this scenario.
