Yes, says Christo Grozev, head of Bellingcat, the Holland-based international consortium of investigative journalists specialising in fact-checking and open-source intelligence.
Bellingcat has proved its credibility by reporting on the Syrian Civil War, the occupation of Donbas and the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, the El Junquito raid, the Yemeni Civil War, the Skripal poisoning and many other flashpoints of recent years.
Bellingcat has earned the right to have its reports treated with utmost seriousness, no matter how apocalyptic they sound. That’s how I took its report this morning, although ‘serious’ doesn’t begin to describe it.
Over the past few days, I’ve been trying to figure out why Putin is cowering in his bunker, hundreds of miles from Moscow.
Having gone over several possibilities, I finally settled on the most plausible one: Putin is preparing a nuclear strike, which could put Moscow in harm’s way. Hence he moved his command centre as far away as sensible.
That was pure conjecture on my part, based on Sherlock Holmes’s principle: if all plausible options but one are rejected, then the remaining one, no matter how unlikely, has to be true.
My hope was that such doomsday scenarios would never leave the realm of purely academic ratiocination. Alas, that hope has turned out to be forlorn – or is about to.
This morning I watched a Russian-language interview with Christo Grozev, who has spent years in Russia, cultivating sources close to the Kremlin. He is understandably reticent about releasing any information that could endanger his informants, only vouchsafing that they are high-ranking officers in the army and the FSB.
According to them, about 10 per cent of those meriting that description are opposed to Putin’s warmongering brinkmanship. That stands to reason: even in Russia officers seldom rise to such heights by being stupid, and intelligent people have to see how tragic the current situation is for the world in general, but especially for Russia herself. Thus they are willing to cooperate, if only to absolve themselves of Putin’s crimes.
Mr Grozdev is fully aware that some such conduits may be used for pumping disinformation. That’s why he and his colleagues verify and crosscheck every report many times over, and only ever release their findings when the veracity of their sources is no longer in doubt. So far everything they have reported has been borne out by facts.
“Almost a year ago,” says Mr Grozev, “I received some credible-sounding information that things would change in Russia in 2022. That it would be like nothing we’ve seen before, that Russia would become a dictatorship. That Russia would be North Korea 2.0 and journalists would be jailed and the free media (well, the remaining islands of free media) would be shut down. And that the country would become an army or it would run like an army.”
All that has already happened or is in train. Russia’s last two quasi-independent broadcast channels have been shut down. Wartime censorship has been introduced, and a law has been passed threatening up to 15 years in prison for anyone spreading “fake news” about the war. Since it is the military censors who will decide what constitutes fake news, any Russian voicing the slightest opposition to Putin’s monstrosity will end up in a prison camp.
Bellingcat’s reports on impending war with the Ukraine have also been confirmed by subsequent events. At the time Mr Grozev first received such information, about nine months ago, he wasn’t satisfied that its source was unimpeachable: “Again, this was a source we couldn’t use but it scared us, and it forced us to look for the data that would support or disprove this.”
His sources report that Putin has gone to war solely for internal political reasons. With the Russian economy plummeting and anti-Putin sentiments soaring, he and his clique have decided on the time-proven diversion strategy: war. That was the only way for them to cling on to power.
It was Herzen (d. 1870) who said that the strongest chains binding the people are forged from victorious swords. Yet if the swords don’t emerge victorious, they can have the opposite effect, hastening the tyrant’s demise. Hence Putin has to win this war at any cost, no matter how exorbitant or diabolical.
How diabolical can it get? The same sources have provided an affirmative answer to the question in the title. According to them, Putin will definitely use tactical nuclear weapons.
Moreover, his targets won’t be in the Ukraine: such an action might conceivably lead to a mutiny in his own army, brainwashed to believe in the sacred kinship between Russians and Ukrainians. Mr Grozev is certain that it’s Nato targets that are earmarked for nuclear treatment.
These could be in the Atlantic, where strategically vital communications cables interlink Nato members. Even more likely, battlefield nuclear warheads will be used to attack Poland, which has turned its airfields into Ukrainian air force bases. In any case, Putin’s shelling of Europe’s biggest nuclear power station shows he doesn’t share our fear of the atom’s destructive power.
Should that attack happen, how would Nato respond? Other than expressing even deeper concerns, that is? If true, these reports re-emphasise the craven idiocy of Nato leaders, Biden and Johnson above all, who have assured Putin that a military response to his aggression against the Ukraine was off the table.
That was an open invitation for Putin to invade – and then continue to up the stakes thereafter. Since the US and Britain have already broken the promises of the Budapest Memorandum, Putin has no persuasive reason to believe they’ll honour Article 5 of the Nato Charter either.
The verb ‘escalate’ comes from the French word for stairs, and Putin is climbing them step by step. He puts his foot on the next step to decide whether it’ll bear his weight. Satisfied that it will, he continues to climb, and so far Nato has missed every opportunity to make him stumble.
We’ll do anything, whimpers Nato, to avoid a nuclear war. ‘Anything’ is a voluminous word, covering, inter alia, abject surrender on all fronts. We are prepared to live in shame, without honour and indeed freedom, to make sure we do live.
By now parallels with Chamberlain, Daladier and Munich have been drawn so often they’ve become trite. Yet the trouble is that such parallel lines are visibly defying Euclid and vindicating Lobachevsky by converging.
Appeasement didn’t work then and it won’t work now. It increasingly appears that we won’t be able to avoid war no matter how prudent and compliant we are. All we can achieve is having to go to war later, and in a weaker strategic position.
We can all hope that Christo Grozev’s sources are wrong or even deliberately misleading. Hope springs eternal and all that. Yet I invite you to join me in praying that our strategic stance rests on a firmer foundation than just hope.
Vlad may decide to use a tactical nuke but not on NATO forces. May use on some Ukrainian city or military unit that is impossible to subdue or compel to surrender. Just to make an example for the rest of the world to see . A message of “don’t mess with us” seen and heard unmistakeable. The Tos-1 weapon was used in Chechnya and does cause the same degree of damage as would a tactical atomic bomb.
Yes, but there’s also that little matter of radiation.
Is there a Russian version of Claus Von Staffenburg?
Stauffenberg was a man of honour. I doubt there are many of those in Putin’s army. But I hope I’m wrong.
I wrote to a friend today:
“With an incompetent fraud as the Prime Minister of the UK and an incompetent dotard as the President of the USA (and with even worse deputies if either of them is removed), and with the morals and policies of the KGB triumphant in Russia, and with atheistic anti-Orthodoxy guiding the Clown-President of Ukraine, what are the chances of peace on Earth to men of good will? […] But we can pray.”
Like you, Mr Boot, I will pray. But let us never forget that we are commanded (not only by St Augustine and St Thomas Aquinas, but also by St Gregory of Nyssa and George MacDonald, and above all by Jesus Christ Triumphant) to pray most fervently for our enemies.
The very least praying can achieve is to give you something to do before the trouble starts.
We are now seriously contemplating temporary evacuation to Pregradnoye or Mednogorsky at the foot of the Caucasus Mountains in Karachaevo-Circassia as the safest place in South Russia, surrounded with mountains on all sides and far from the military-industrial facilities which could be possible targets of retaliatory nuclear strikes. In the meantime we have a feeling of being spectators in the theatre of absurdity with a big drama show rolled out by the world LGBT elite. The first scene was the laboratory-induced pandemic followed by attempted en-masse vaccination. Now all of a sudden, there’s a heavy curtain falling on the pandemic scene, no more chemical trails in the skies dispersing the deadly virus, and the statistics of COVID cases plummeting down from 10,000 new daily cases in Moscow only a month ago to 1,000 cases now and further down. The second scene is a possible nuclear holocaust with the whole world being hostage to a single bunker madman. It’s also about hatred deliberately sown between two brotherly Slavic nations which otherwise could prove to be a conservative barrier to the spread of liberal sodomite “values”. Both scenes are meant to convince the global community that nation states and national governments are incapable of addressing the daunting challenges faced by humanity. Hence the urgent need for a single world government and a new world order to manage the crises of that magnitude.