Russians debate nuking us

Notes on the news

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Zelensky says that Russia is considering launching a terror attack at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant. This should be taken with utmost seriousness—if Biden is anywhere but in an emergency session with the National Security Council, he should not be. Zelensky said:

There was just a report from our intelligence and the Security Service of Ukraine.

Intelligence has received information that Russia is considering the scenario of a terrorist act at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant—terrorist act with the release of radiation. They have prepared everything for this.

Unfortunately, I had to be reminded more than once that radiation knows no national borders and who it hits is determined only by the direction of the wind.

We share all available information with our partners—everyone in the world. All the evidence. Europe, America, China, Brazil, India, the Arab world, Africa—all countries, absolutely everyone should know this. International organizations. All of them.

There should never be any terrorist attacks on nuclear power plants, anywhere. This time it should not be like with Kakhovka: the world has been warned, therefore, the world can and must act.

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Simultaneously, in Russia, a debate about whether to end the nuclear taboo has burst into the public realm. It began with an article by pro-Kremlin political scientist Sergei Karaganov, published in the Russian- and English-language journal, Russia in Global Politics. He argued that Russia should lower its threshold for the use of nuclear weapons and launch a strike on the West to break our will. (We published this article in Global Eyes on June 15.)

It caused a firestorm (so to speak) of mostly negative responses from Russian foreign and defense policy experts and academics. Hanna Notte, who studies Russia’s foreign and security policy—and especially its nuclear weapons policy—compiled a list of these articles, writing, “I don’t think I’ve ever seen the Russian strategic community engage in such intense public debate over nuclear use as over the past week.”