This a good article from Dominic Lawson who has a Ukrainian guest called Vera ! In full as it is behind a paywall.
www.thetimes.co.uk/article/putin-wont-use-nukes-comment-war-ukraine-russia-sh33cjk6b
My Ukrainian guest fears Armageddon
The nuclear threat feels real to people like Vera but won’t break their resolve
Dominic Lawson
Sunday October 09 2022, 12.01am BST, The Sunday Times
My main job over the past few days has been to reassure Vera. She is the Ukrainian woman who, with her ten-year-old son, has been living with us for the past two months. At the start of last week her husband, still in Kyiv, told her the city council had begun to distribute potassium iodide pills for use in evacuation centres. These pills, as he did not need to point out to her, are designed to help block the absorption of dangerously high doses of radiation.
This was a response to President Putin’s latest apparent threat to use nuclear weapons, in his rambling speech following the spurious referendums “Russifying” four Ukrainian regions: “Our country also has various means of destruction, and in some components more modern than those of the Nato countries. And if the territorial integrity of our country is threatened, we will certainly use all the means at our disposal to protect Russia and our people. It’s not a bluff.”
For Vera, despite her robust character, this was terrifying. She had fled to the west of the country, on the border with Slovakia, when Russian forces launched their original bombardment of Kyiv; and she sees a nuclear attack on the capital as something Putin is quite capable of. I should add that she is Russian-speaking, and her torment is increased by the fact that her close relatives in Russia are firm supporters of Putin.
To many of us in the safety of this country the idea the Russian president would risk nuclear Armageddon seems overwrought. But when I spoke to Orysia Lutsevych, head of Chatham House’s Ukraine Forum, she explained: “Ukrainians living in the central region of the country see Putin’s nuclear threat through the prism of the Chernobyl experience. They know what it is to flee radiation. It feels very real to them, not some dystopian fantasy. Putin understands this, which is why he thinks this threat is a way to make the Ukrainian people capitulate. His army bombing within hundreds of metres of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power station is similarly designed to terrify.”
She added: “My daughter is in Ukraine and one night recently she told me that she didn’t want to fall asleep ‘because there may be no world tomorrow’.” This is the place to recall that the UK was one of the signatories of the 1994 Budapest memorandum, in which we, America and Russia pledged to respect the “independence and sovereignty in the existing borders” of Ukraine and to “refrain from the threat or use of force against” that country. That’s what it took to persuade Ukraine to give up the nuclear arsenal it had inherited after the dissolution of the USSR. Ukrainians now believe it was a catastrophic error to agree to that. But at least the military support recently given to them by the western signatories is in the spirit of the Budapest memorandum, even if that document contained no enforcement clause.
That’s not enough to reassure Vera, however. So I tried other ways of reducing her anxiety (and, to be frank, my own). I pointed out that Putin had, on the day he launched his “special military operation”, threatened the West that “whoever tries to hinder us [will face] consequences that you have never faced before in your history” and publicly ordered his chief of the general staff to put Russia’s “deterrent forces” on high alert. Since then the US in particular has massively “hindered” Russia with a supply of the most advanced weaponry, giving Ukraine a completely unforeseen superiority in artillery. Yet Putin did not carry out his threat.
I also pointed out to Vera that Putin’s recent renewal of this warning needed to be read in full. His speech was in fact about a Russian response to an alleged western nuclear threat: “Nuclear blackmail also came into play. We are talking ... about the statements of some high-ranking representatives of the leading Nato states about the possibility and admissibility of using weapons of mass destruction, nuclear weapons, against Russia.” It was after this remark that he made his own threat (“I want to remind you that our country also has various means of destruction ...”). In other words, this was a threatened retaliation to something that, actually, isn’t happening.
It is true that Russian military doctrine, as set out two years ago by Putin in a public executive order, allows first use of nuclear weapons if conventional attacks on Russia create a situation in which “the very existence of the state is in jeopardy”. Now that Kyiv’s forces have recaptured part of the Ukrainian areas Putin farcically declared to be “permanently” part of Russia after those so-called referendums, perhaps the president might claim he has the right under Russian law to, for example, employ tactical battlefield nuclear weapons against Ukrainian troops.
But as the military author and former Royal Navy officer Lewis Page recently pointed out, the Russian president’s “nuclear briefcase, the ‘Cheget’, is not directly hooked up to any nukes. Its function is to confirm that attack orders have been issued by the president. The president’s Cheget-authenticated orders pass to the Russian general staff, the high command of the Russian armed forces, who then direct action by nuclear weapons units. Putin needs agreement from the general staff to carry out any nuclear strike.”
My suspicion is that the Russian general staff are not just profoundly disillusioned with Putin; they will also have heard the former CIA chief General David Petraeus say that if Russia used nuclear weapons in Ukraine, the US would “take out every Russian conventional force that we can see and identify on the battlefield in Ukraine and also in Crimea and every ship in the Black Sea”. In other words, the general staff know that Russia — and her military — would face a more existential threat if they obeyed a “Cheget” order from Putin than if they refused to carry it out.
It seemed to reassure Vera when I said all this. But then early on Friday morning she was worried all over again, having heard the news that President Biden had warned that the world could face “Armageddon” if Putin used a tactical nuclear weapon to try to turn the tide of the war in Ukraine.
So I said to Vera, “This is not a warning to Ukraine to cease her military counterattack. It is the opposite: a message to the Russian people, people like your relatives, that they will be at risk as never before if their president uses nuclear force against Kyiv. And they will get the point.”
That did seem to help; and besides, as Vera made very clear to me, for all her fears, she does not want Ukraine to concede an inch in its fight to repel Putin’s chaotic but cruel military machine. She wants to return to a free country.