Russia, faced with the dilemma of withdrawing from Ukraine or blowing up the Zaporizhia nuclear power plant and losing everything

Although at the moment everything points to the crossing of a few soldiers from the city of Kherson, with the intention of clearing the area of ​​Russian machine guns and establishing a point of support for a possible subsequent landing of armored vehicles, the truth is that the arrival of troops on the southern bank of the Dnieper is bad news for Russia. If they managed to consolidate the position, they could try to move up the river towards the destroyed Nova Kakhovka dam and thus threaten the Energodar nuclear power plant from the east and west at the same time, probably forcing the Russians to leave the area.

Perhaps for this reason, in the last hours, the Ukrainian authorities (first, President Zelensky, and this same Sunday, the head of the Main Intelligence Directorate of the Ministry of Defence, Kiril Budanov) have repeated their conviction that Russia is willing to to use the desperate resource of blowing up the reactors of the plant to cause a radioactive disaster as soon as all your troops have withdrawn from the compound. Apparently, the mining of the area would have taken place throughout the winter and spring and the plan to blow it all up would have already been approved by the Kremlin, although Sergei Lavrov, Russian foreign minister, denied everything in statements to the TASS agency.

[Prigozhin reaparece: “Hemos dado una master class de cómo habría que haber invadido Ucrania”]

From “scorched earth” to “radiated earth”

Who are we to believe in this dilemma? Lavrov says that the idea of ​​mining and blowing up a nuclear power plant is nonsense. And it is. Now, Russia has a long history of “nonsense” behind it and is a specialist in denying exactly what it is going to end up doing weeks or months later. The explosion of the Energodar nuclear power plant would mean taking the typical “scorched earth policies” of all wars to an unknown dimension: the damage that radiation could cause to the area is incalculable and in no case would they be limited to the surroundings of the plant.

Having said this, it is obvious that we are before a state that lives submerged in absolute chaos. A state in which no one is clear who is in charge or who is in charge of calculating risks and benefits. If Saturday’s ‘Spartacus’ adventure showed us anything, it is precisely that there is no one behind the wheel. Or that there are so many people trying to get in the driver’s seat at the same time that any decision is possible. The lack of control is such that in the last few hours a rumor has emerged that Prigozhin himself would have seized nuclear material as he passed through Voronezh. A crazy rumor in any other circumstance, but even worrisome in the current context.

[Rusia sospecha que la inteligencia de EEUU está involucrada en el motín del grupo Wagner]

It is difficult to know what exactly Russia would gain by doing something like this. It is true that a huge exclusion zone would be generated that would paralyze any offensive, but that, strictly speaking, is not gaining anything, since they themselves would have to withdraw from the conquered territory instead of defending it. They would leave a country -or a large part of it- destroyed and with thousands of deaths… Now, a good part of those thousands of deaths would also be their own troops and the pro-Russian citizens themselves whom they say they have “liberated” with their “military operation special”. There is a clearly suicidal drive in such a decision.

NATO article five

The thing would not stop there. At the international level, playing radioactive chaos would mean the unanimous condemnation of the entire international community and, especially, from neighboring countries such as Turkey, a traditional ally of the Putin regime and which could be affected by the radiation cloud. China would probably break its equidistance and he would already speak out clearly against the invasion of the Ukraine, leaving Russia and its dictator even more alone than they already are.

[¿Conocía Ucrania el plan de Prigozhin? Lanzó un ataque en varios frentes horas antes de su rebelión]

Precisely the arrival of radiation to Turkey or Poland, NATO member countries, could in turn justify the application of article five of the Atlantic Alliance, which includes the use of force in the event that it is considered that the safety of any of its components is being compromised. Although US senators Lindsey Graham (Republican Party) and Richard Blumenthal (Democratic Party) declared last Friday that the explosion of the nuclear power plant meets that requirement, the truth is that it is not a unilateral decision: the Security Council has to meet, agree on the attack and then each country has autonomy to decide if it participates in it and in what way.

In the event of a nuclear disaster and, indeed, NATO decided to act, we understand that it would be governed by the principles that its Secretary General, Jens Stoltenberg, and the US Defense Chief of Staff, Mark Milley, already made clear when the possible use of tactical nuclear weapons was rumored last fall by Russia on Ukrainian territory: a conventional weapons response that would completely clean up any traces of Russian military presence, both in Ukraine and in the Black Sea. Looking at what Prigozhin achieved with some fifteen thousand men in sixteen hours, it doesn’t look like Russia is in a position to go to war with NATO right now.

[Chechenia, Bielorrusia, Osetia… El dominó de rebeliones que acecha a Putin tras la de Wagner]

In any case, even if the episode did not lead to a response at the highest level, Russia still has much more to lose than to gain even at the national level. The radiation would spread through the west of their own state and, without a doubt, he would settle in Crimea, one of the great tourist centers, which is preparing for an already complicated summer season. Crimea is the jewel in Putin’s crown, who went so far as to build the gigantic Kerch bridge just to be able to unite the peninsula with Russian land. Is he willing to watch him rot under radiation just to defend a piece of land that doesn’t belong to him? It doesn’t seem the most sensible. But it is Russia.