Of course, Putin would use nukes

Of course, Vladimir Putin would use nuclear weapons. But not because he’s suicidal or crazy. Rather, for the very reasons of his own character that reflects what is sometimes called “the mystery of the Russian soul”.

But first, to clear things out: during the Cold War there was a KGB active measure aimed to frighten the West by sowing rumors about a total insanity of the Soviet leaders who could use nukes at any moment. The goal was to prevent the West from taking steps under the threat of a nuclear war.

In no way Vladimir Putin is insane in that sense, that he can order the use of nuclear weapons, whether tactical or strategic, because he doesn’t know what he’s doing. “Screw it, let’s do it” is not at all Putin’s moto.

Putin is, and always has been a highly calculated and cautious man - just like a mid-level KGB officer is supposed to be. So he won’t order nukes because he doesn’t care about the consequences. But he will use it if he thinks he is well-protected from the response. That sound crazy? Not to a man who is so heavily misinformed by his own yes-men that he started a full-scale war on Ukraine expecting Ukrainians to meet him with flowers and tears of joy. We know for a fact Putin expected just that as several days into the bloody war he addressed Ukrainian Army directly offering them to surrender. To him, the problem was a tiny group of Ukrainian “nationalists” and Western puppets. The rest of Ukraine dreamt of Putin and the Russky Mir to come and liberate them.

Two months into the bloody war, Putin threatened the West with some super-weapons “that nobody else can boast about today”. Alas, his military chiefs must have told him another lie - that Russia has some wonder-weapon that can do magic (unlike regular army, apparently). An intelligent person would have done the math and realized that an Army so heavily embezzled it couldn’t take over a single tiny city in Ukraine, can’t have any magic weapons. It takes intelligence and courage to acknowledge things like that. Putin has neither.

Coming back to nukes: could Putin be told by his military that his bunker, that is said to be a town rather than a room, is nuclear-resistant and that he can survive there while “the enemy” die?

In 2017 Putin demonstrated Oliver Stone in Stone’s documentary about Russian leader a video of Russia’s air-strikes in Syria. In reality, the footage was from American Apache helicopters hitting Taliban fighters in Afghanistan in 2009. Downloaded from Youtube.

That is to say, Putin’s is not a superman, nor is he a super villain. He is simply weak, as he himself constructed a power model in which he isolated himself from independent information - out of abundance of precaution, and therefore became easily manipulated by his close circle. If there is someone in Russia who is misinformed and truly brainwashed by the propaganda, it’s Vladimir Putin himself. He doesn't know that he doesn’t know anything.

So if we were to presume Putin does think he’s immune to a nuclear response, it all comes down to WHY he’d do that. Oh, but because he can. And because he, he thinks, can get away with it. And because he’s already lost this war. And because he can’t win. As my dear friend put it in a private conversation - I’d love to steal it from her, but I can’t, “he’d use nukes to prove he’s got the balls and his penis is not tiny - neither of which, by the way, is true”.

And he’d use nukes because as a true Russian in that sense, Putin has an enormous feeling of his own grandiosity and superiority. He thinks he can and in fact is entitled to do all sorts of horrible things because he’s special, and regular consequences don’t apply to him.

That is why the very first thing the West should do after Putin’s regime - and most probably Russia itself, falls apart, is to make Russia give up its nuclear weapons, all of it. But that is a whole new topic for a discussion.

*Please, forgive any grammar mistakes or not conventionally constructed sentences.