Ukraine: someone must be wrong

By Richard North - September 25, 2022

Josep Borrell, lest we all forget, is the EU’s High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy. And he says that Putin’s dramatic new threat to deploy nuclear weapons must be taken seriously.

The world is at a “dangerous moment”, with the Russian president having been “pushed into a corner” as a result of his failing war in Ukraine, Borrell says. “When people say it is not a bluff, you have to take them seriously”.

However, Borrell, and therefore the EU, don’t seem to be on the same page as the Washington Post, which may or may not reflect the view of the State Department.

The WaPo clearly is not in a mood to take Putin seriously, asserting that the Russian president will probably not drop an atomic bomb on Ukraine, if only because doing so would prove exceptionally costly for Russia and the world.

Instead, the paper warns that his words have consequences, and in threatening to use nuclear weapons, reaching for shock effect, Putin is “venturing into extreme recklessness”.

Without any doubt, the paper says, the use of a nuclear weapon in Ukraine would create a humanitarian cataclysm, citing Paul Craig and John Jungerman who wrote a history of the arms race, “The overwhelming fact of the nuclear fire is that it is more powerful by a factor of 10 million to 100 million than chemical fires,” such as those in conventional weapons, they say.

The blast, heat and radiation from a nuclear bomb could easily spread beyond Ukraine to endanger lives in Russia and elsewhere. This grim prospect of blowback might restrain Putin, if he is thinking rationally. Also, the paper says, There are no military gains to be had from a nuclear attack that indiscriminately incinerates everything in its path and leaves the land uninhabitable.

Then we have Mark Galeotti writing for The Sunday Times writing under the heading: “Putin knows he can’t win in Ukraine. His only goal now is to save face and stay in power”.

Putin, he says, has again dropped unsubtle hints that he would resort to nuclear weapons if challenged. In Galeotti’s view, he is clearly hoping that these apocalyptic threats will deter further incursions into what Moscow will now claim is Russian territory.

Russia’s nuclear doctrine, he argues, reserves use to defence of the motherland, and after annexation the occupied territories will count as such, at least in the Kremlin’s thinking.

But, Galeotti concludes, this is a transparent gambit and almost certainly a bluff – he must be hoping that even if Kiev is unconvinced, a nervous West will lobby the Ukrainians to hold back, even if there seems no evidence that this will happen.

Not even the Observer affords any relief from the torrent of negativity, having Simon Tisdall’s article headed: “Vladimir Putin’s ship of fools is sinking fast. Will he take everyone down with him?”

More than ever, Tisdall writes: “Vladimir Putin resembles the captain of the Titanic: steaming full speed ahead towards disaster, deluded by inaccurate assumptions about his ship’s invincibility, and blind to darkly looming hazards”.

Instead of threatening nuclear war in his speech, he says, Putin might easily have followed a different tack. Instead of escalating, he could have claimed victory, declared a ceasefire. Tisdall continues:

An offer of negotiations would have wrongfooted Kiev, stymying its advance, freezing the conflict and dividing Moscow’s enemies. He could have won time to regroup. He could even have put his hand up, swallowed humble pie. But he didn’t do any of that. Ever resentful and vindictive, Putin lacks the necessary courage and imagination. He got it wrong, again. And so a critical moment passed. Now it’s Russia’s regime, not Ukraine, that faces shipwreck.

All that seems to point in but one direction, with Olga Chyzh writing in the Guardian that: “Putin needs nothing short of a miracle to avoid a devastating defeat in Ukraine”.

On that basis, there seems little hope for Putin. Borrell’s injunction that we should take his nuclear threat seriously looks misplaced and we can soon expect the Russian threat to be contained.

And yet, as I wrote recently, the use of nuclear weapons does not necessarily presage an Armageddon scenario. The effects of low yield nukes could be contained within the borders of Ukraine, without impacting on any other country.

Under such circumstances, one cannot assume that their use would necessarily trigger direct US intervention, much less nuclear retaliation leading to all-out war. And, although low yield nukes are often categorised as tactical weapons, the example I gave of them being used to damage Ukraine’s gas infrastructure suggests that they could be used to achieve a strategic effect.

What worries me here, therefore, is the shallowness of the discourse. The mention of nuclear weapons seems to invite the construction of one-dimensional scenarios, with little exploration of the numerous permutations involving their use.

And when the media consensus seems largely to favour one outcome – the eventual defeat of Putin’s Russia, by one pathway or another – I begin to wonder just how reliable most of the analyses are that we are seeing in the legacy media.

Occasionally, attention is drawn to outlier pieces, such as this in The American Conservative written by retired US Army Colonel Douglas Macgregor.

Described as an “unconventional thinker” with a chequered career and a recent history of serving as an advisor to the acting Secretary of Defense in the Trump administration, Macgregor is an easy man to dismiss, especially when his arguments seem to run contrary to the received wisdom.

One of the reasons why I discontinued my day-to-day coverage of the Russo-Ukraine war, though, was a growing unease about the reliability of the information on which we are feeding, and the difficulty in getting reliable, independent corroboration.

Something which has troubled me from the very start is the suspicion that the Ukrainians are overstating Russian losses, and understating their own, and possibly to a significant degree.

Occasionally, we get a limited insight as to Ukraine’s true casualty rate, and here we find that Macgregor avers that the loss rate in the current counter-offensive has been high.

Depending on the source, write Macgregor, citing a BBC article, an estimated 5,000 to 10,000 Ukrainian troops were killed or wounded in a flat, open area that Russian artillery, rockets, and air strikes turned into a killing field.

With a different spin on a number of other issues, we see a picture that points to a very different scenario to that to which we have become accustomed, suggesting that Ukrainian forces are bleeding to death in counterattack after counterattack.

Of this, I have no way of vouching for the veracity or otherwise of such an assertion, but given the reluctance to trust any published source, one is left with the nagging thought that such claims cannot entirely be dismissed.

Stepping aside from the received wisdom, therefore, it is possible to construct a sound rationale for Putin’s nuclear threat and hold Borrell’s view that it should be taken seriously.

There is a great deal unknown to us about the conduct of the war in Ukraine, and it would be a mistake to hold on to a consensus that is perhaps driven more by ignorance and dogma than sound judgement. Where opinions so sharply differ, not everybody can be right – the corollary of which is that someone must be wrong.