Mortality rate of wounded Russian soldiers exceeds 50%
Olha Hlushchenko – October 15, 2022
Due to the low quality of medical care and the reluctance of the Russian command to evacuate the seriously wounded to Russia, the mortality rate among the latter exceeds 50%.
Details: The General Staff reports that, according to available information, many injured are being admitted to medical facilities in the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine.
Thus, in one of Donetsk’s hospitals, about 100 wounded were admitted this week.
Hospitals are overcrowded in the city of Tokmak, Zaporizhzhia Oblast. According to information from local residents, civilians are not being admitted to hospital because doctors are overloaded and there is a lack of hospital beds.
“Due to the low quality of medical care and the refusal by the Russian occupying forces’ command to evacuate the seriously wounded to Russia, the mortality rate among their injured service personnel exceeds 50%”, the General Staff noted.
Adam Curtis’ astonishing autopsy of the fall of Russia will leave you wide-eyed
Jasper Rees – October 13, 2022
Adam CurtisBritish documentary filmmaker (born 1955)
Russia 1985-1999: TraumaZone – BBC Pictures/BBC Pictures
A long dark road ploughs through a wasteland of snow towards an icy horizon. Welcome, this opening image unequivocally says, to post-Soviet hell, where women wait in line for meat and abortions, men brawl in banks and parliaments, where everyone sells anything to survive – shoes, bodies, blood.
In Russia 1985-1999: TraumaZone (BBC iPlayer), documentary essayist Adam Curtis has filleted thousands of hours of unused footage from the BBC’s archive to craft a phantasmagoric autopsy of the USSR as it breaks apart in a thousand brutal ways, making way for capitalism. The result is a garish multi-part disaster epic.
Onto a boundless compendium of chaos Curtis has contrived to impose structure via canny juxtapositions and ironic echoes. Thus in the first film the corpse of Kim Philby seems to symbolize the death of communism. In the last film, it’s the turn of democracy to lie in an open casket at the funeral of politician Galina Starovoitova, murdered a month after speaking to the BBC. In between, the leitmotif of death is everywhere from Chernobyl to Chechnya, from the reassembled bones of the last tsar to the looted graves of German soldiers.
No film by Curtis comes without a portion of irate mansplaining, crammed here into captions which tell of Gorbachev, Yeltsin and a harmless-looking pipsqueak called Putin the oligarchs finally install as their puppet. Mainly, though, he lets astonishing pictures do the talking.
“May the Russians and all generations of Russians be damned to hell!” screams a woman fleeing the bombing of Grozny. Elsewhere, expectant Russian mothers are coached to sing to their unborn children who’ll now be old enough to bomb Zaporizhzhia.
Alongside such dolorous portents, surreal metaphors for delusion and dysfunction sprout like irradiated knotweed. Grotesque bodybuilders flex pecs under giant images of Marx and Lenin. A bear wanders the forest by night, infra-red eyes glaring as if in psychic shock. A cosmonaut is marooned in the Mir station because there’s no money to fly him home.
From America, among many chancers, comes a motivational speaker teaching Russia’s women to smile. The most captivating smile of all belongs to wily street beggar Natasha. Imagine Shirley Temple in a novel by Dostoevsky. Filmed across several years by a BBC crew, like a good capitalist she eventually requests remuneration. “You’ll get paid,” she argues, “and it’s costing me my time.” This staggering masterpiece is worth yours.
‘Everything has collapsed’: Russia’s draft tanks small businesses
October 12, 2022
In his brand new co-working space in Chelyabinsk, a city in central Russia, entrepreneur Maxim Novikov is counting the empty seats.
The space is usually overflowing with designers, programmers and young Russians working on their start-ups.
But since President Vladimir Putin announced a mobilisation of hundreds of thousands of young Russian men last month, the 33-year-old has lost much of his clientele.
“Many have stopped coming,” he told AFP by phone.
Instead, they are filling the depleted ranks of Russia’s army or they are among the tens of thousands of others who have fled south for neighboring Kazakhstan.
The Kremlin’s mobilisation has brought uncertainty and chaos to businesses already hard-hit by sanctions and still recovering from the fallout of the pandemic.
In the last three weeks, a little more than half of the 77 spots in Novikov’s co-working place were occupied.
He has “no idea” if the people who fled or were drafted will keep paying subscription fees, which cost between 70 and 130 dollars.
And now Novikov is worried about his loans.
“Turnover has already dropped by more than 40 percent this year,” Novikov, an architecture graduate, said.
“I wanted to buy a third space but for the moment it is not possible to take the risk.”
– ‘Projects on hold’ –
But he is far from the only business owner in Russia who is growing more nervous over the workforce vacuum.
“It means projects are being put on hold and private companies will be afraid to invest,” said Natalia Zubarevich, an economist at Moscow State University.
Russia’s economy has already been battered this year by unprecedented Western sanctions in response to Putin’s decision to send troops to Ukraine on February 24.
But Zubarevich said mobilisation was an “additional aggravating factor.”
She added she was not surprised young men from the provinces were joining the army, attracted by monthly payouts that are sometimes almost as much as their annual salaries.
Meanwhile, in glitzy central Moscow, 45-year-old Yelena Irisova is distraught at seeing her company, which produces luxury leather bags, stop production.
She employs around ten people in the small business.
But two of her craftsmen left the company in recent weeks — one fearing mobilisation, another to help her daughter whose husband had been sent to the front.
“After September 21, everything collapsed,” Irisova said. “Our sales fell threefold — from 10 to three orders a day.”
She says her savings will keep her going “a month or two, but not more.”
– Almost no orders –
No Russian business seems unscathed.
Katerina Iberika, 39, who owns a pastry shop specialising in birthday cakes in Moscow, is also facing ruin.
Her five employees are women with exemptions from mobilisation. But it’s the low morale among the public that’s endangering her business.
“Cancellations of orders for big events started two days before mobilisation,” Iberika told AFP.
Now she gets nearly no orders at all, except for “very small” ones.
She is considering leaving Russia.
In increased isolation — and hit by sanctions and mobilisation — an anxious Russian society is watching its spending closely.
“People are looking to put their money aside,” Sofya Donets, chief economist for Russia at Renaissance Capital, said.
“They’re not going to overspend.”
Some industries have been harder hit than others by a sudden lack of men.
Employers have sounded the alarm in recent days, asking the government for exemptions from mobilisation, in particular for small and medium-sized companies.
Russia’s economic development ministry told AFP that it had drawn up a list of measures for these “problematic issues”.
It said it had facilitated grants and micro credits.
“A mobilised entrepreneur will be able to suspend the fulfilment of obligations” to pay the loans back, the ministry said.
Analyst Sofya Donets expects “more intervention and state aid” to calm the effects of mobilisation.
Especially since Russian coffers continue to fill up thanks to its energy exports.
Huge lines as drivers wait to cross damaged Crimea bridge
October 9, 2022
STORY: A flagship project for Russian President Vladimir Putin, built at a reported cost of $3.6 billion, the bridge was damaged in a powerful blast on Saturday.
The blast, which officials said killed three people, hit a crucial supply route for Russian forces in Ukraine.
Thousands of motorists were stranded in the queues.
“We got here at 11:10 in the morning and we’ll have to stay here because we need to get back home. I think we will cross the bridge by midnight,” one of the drivers, Artyom Babak, told Reuters.
Another motorists estimated the queue was about 9.3 miles (15 kilometers) long and would take up to 10 hours to pass.
Russian President Vladimir Putin unveiled the bridge in 2018 after Moscow annexed Crimea from Ukraine in 2014.
‘They Are in a Panic’: Ukraine’s Troops Size Up the Enemy
Carlotta Gall – October 7, 2022
Ukrainians walk past a destroyed Russian tank in the recaptured village of Yatskivka, Ukraine, Oct. 4, 2022. (Ivor Prickett/The New York Times)
STAVKY, Ukraine — Racing down a road with his men in pursuit of retreating Russian soldiers, a battalion commander came across an abandoned Russian armored vehicle, its engine still running. Inside there was a sniper rifle, rocket propelled grenades, helmets and belongings. The men were gone.
“They dropped everything: personal care, helmets,” said the commander, who uses the code name Swat. “I think it was a special unit, but they were panicking. It was raining very hard, the road was bad and they drop everything and move.”
After months of static fighting and holding the line under withering Russian artillery barrages, Ukrainian soldiers are exulting over their smashing of Russian lines in the northeast three weeks ago, and their recapturing of swaths of territory seized by Russian troops earlier this year. They have almost retaken the whole of Kharkiv province, as well as territory in each of the four regions that President Vladimir Putin claims to have annexed for Russia.
There has been little time for reflection for the Ukrainians as they press their counterattack, focused on keeping the pressure on the retreating Russian army to prevent it from regrouping. Yet after months in the trenches never seeing the faces of the enemy, Ukrainian soldiers and commanders have now engaged the Russians up close and gotten a chance to size up their opponent.
“We have the strength to do this,” Swat said. “Because right now they are in panic, they really are in panic.”
A 58-year-old career soldier, Swat came out of retirement to join the Carpathian Sich, a volunteer battalion, taking over command after his predecessor was killed in battle near Izium in June.
The battalion has been in the forefront of the fighting, providing flanking support in battles for the strategically important cities of Izium and Lyman in recent weeks. Four days ago the battalion seized another town farther east, helping secure a series of dams and the last settlements of northern Donetsk province for Ukraine.
The battles have been fast moving, and in the flight from Izium, produced a great deal of panic on the Russian side. After the capture of Izium, Swat said, his unit pursued Russian troops for 15 miles down the road in one day. A few more days and Ukrainian troops were at the gates of Lyman, 30 miles south of Izium; Swat’s group moved east to block any attempt by the Russian army to send reinforcements.
The day Lyman fell, his battalion was attacking another town farther east. He asked for security reasons not to disclose the location. His units captured the town in a day, without losses, although nine soldiers were wounded. By the third day they had searched and secured the town and handed it over to another group so they could pull back and recharge.
Then after three weeks of sweeping success and minimal losses, the battalion lost five men in a Russian missile strike and Swat lost a close friend when their car hit a mine. Swat was driving but survived with a concussion.
Tearing up when he talked of his friend in an interview, he asked that a reporter not sugarcoat events of the war with only success stories.
In the battle for Izium, Swat was preparing his assault when he saw Russian troops suddenly falling back, he said. Ukrainian brigades attacking from the north had taken a main highway, cutting Russian troops’ supply lines, his deputy commander said.
They moved up the timing of their assault and the unit raced in from the south and seized a high point in the city.
Russian armored vehicles were defending, firing machines guns, Swat said. “But people were so excited, no one stopped,” he said. “I was running with a pistol. It’s like a small feeling of victory. It’s unbelievable, you feel it inside, you are happy.”
“We get this hill,” he said, “It was happiness, everyone jumping, shooting, hugging each other.”
The men were firing off their weapons, not listening when he ordered them to cease fire, he said. It was just a minor firefight, given that the Russians were already withdrawing, but the capture of Izium gave them a huge boost of confidence. It was vindication, he said, for three months of grueling fighting defending positions under Russian artillery and airstrikes that cost them many lives, he said.
As they raced down the road south from Izium after retreating Russian troops, they captured some enemy soldiers who were sleeping off lunch in a camp in the forest. “They were surprised, seven of them,” he said. “No one expected that after lunch we would advance on a forest line.”
Some of the Russians, demotivated and scared, and some hungry, were ready to give themselves up, he said. But some kept fighting, believing Russian indoctrination that the Ukrainians would torture and kill them if they allowed themselves to be captured.
On one occasion a Russian soldier pulled the pin of a grenade and killed himself, saying he would never let himself be taken prisoner, Swat said. “We jumped to him but we were too late,” he said. “So they are also brave soldiers, and they are afraid.”
His battalion has taken more than 30 Russians prisoner in seven months of fighting, 23 of them in the counterattack, he said. “We just get information from them, give them water, food, warm clothes and send them to a higher level,” he said.
It has been a steep learning curve for his men, not only in survival but in humanity. A 27-year-old American platoon commander from his battalion, who uses the code name Boris, said one of his most intense moments of the war came when he held a cup of water for a Russian prisoner to drink.
But the fighting units had little time to chase deserters.
In some places local residents told them they were sheltering Russian soldiers who had either fled their posts or been left behind, but Swat said he did not have time to stop. And in the past few days, he said, Ukrainian air reconnaissance tracked Russian units pulling out on foot through the forests using good military tactics — spreading out, moving slowly — but again his units were too tied up to pursue them.
The platoon commander named Boris said their units had carried out several assaults on Izium from the southwest in the weeks before the counterattack, luring the Russians into reinforcing in that direction. When the full force of the counterattack came from the north, they were not expecting it, he said.
That does not mean there was not resistance.
The Russians were often set up in well dug-in machine gun nests, several Ukrainian commanders and soldiers said. And once Russian troops pull back, there can be heavy bombardment from Russian planes, artillery and long-range missiles. A powerful missile strike demolished a former Russian command post in the town they seized recently, killing five of his men, he said.
“It was like a cold water shower,” Swat said. Referring to the five who died, he said: “For two days I was like, crazy. They were young guys.”
For all the recent defeats, he said, he does not think the Russian army is by any means broken. “They will fight, they continue to fight,” he said. “It’s the Slavic mentality: to fight for your friends. They also have friends who died.”
He and his men all voiced concern about the mobilization in Russia, and the new strength it would bring to the Russian side.
The Ukrainian army is growing stronger, but it is not yet where it needs to be, Swat said. “For all these small victories, it was a very, very tough time,” he said of the last seven months of the war. “Slowly we recover, but we are not there yet. And Russia has a lot of power, and it is unlimited in its weapons.”
In the village of Stavky, some 10 miles from the front line, the sounds of the Russian bombardment of recently recaptured settlements to the east were loud enough for soldiers and civilians to stop talking and listen.
But commanders and soldiers seemed to agree that Ukrainian troops should keep pushing before the Russian side could regroup.
“We have only one month to do this right now, because right now they are in panic,” Swat said. And winter was closing in. “Now we need to get winter clothes, and we are going to have mud.”
Putin’s Own Allies Turn On Him as Ukraine Unleashes Hell in Stolen Russian Tanks
Dan Ladden-Hall – October 7, 2022
Sergei Karpukhin/Reuters
Hot on the heels of embarrassing reports of Russian recruits fighting each other and Moscow loyalists calling for Kremlin ministers to kill themselves, it seems the rage against Vladimir Putin’s handling of his invasion of Ukraine is now openly being conveyed to the man himself by members of his own inner circle.
A report Friday—which is Putin’s 70th birthday—said that one of the despot’s closest allies had openly challenged the disastrous way the war was being conducted. The landmark challenge was even significant enough to be included in U.S. President Joe Biden’s daily intelligence briefing, according to anonymous officials cited by the Washington Post.
Although the individual who voiced the dissent was not identified, their discontent was said to center around mistakes being made by those directing the “special military operation” in Ukraine.
“Since the start of the occupation we have witnessed growing alarm from a number of Putin’s inner circle,” a Western intelligence official told the Post. “Our assessments suggest they are particularly exercised by recent Russian losses, misguided direction and extensive military shortcomings.”
As well as the embarrassing leak from U.S. officials, British intelligence also gave Putin an unwelcome birthday surprise with a mind-blowing report on the staggering number of captured Russian tanks and armored vehicles currently being used by Ukraine.
“Repurposed captured Russian equipment now makes up a large proportion of Ukraine’s military hardware,” the report from the U.K.’s defense ministry said. “Ukraine has likely captured at least 440 Russian Main Battle Tanks, and around 650 other armored vehicles since the invasion. Over half of Ukraine’s currently fielded tank fleet potentially consists of captured vehicles.”
“The failure of Russian crews to destroy intact equipment before withdrawing or surrendering highlights their poor state of training and low levels of battle discipline,” the report added.
The Kremlin’s latest ignominies come after a series of crushing military setbacks in Ukraine, which has seen Moscow’s forces kicked out of key areas in territory that Putin is claiming to formally control after signing treaties to annex huge swathes of Ukraine into the Russian Federation.
Having plunged his nation into chaos and sparking fears about nuclear weapon use the world over, Putin is said to be working on his birthday this year where he would have once spent the day with an old comrade fishing in Siberia. It’s probably just as well, as you’d be hard pressed to find many up for a hearty rendition of “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.”
Russian missiles slam into Ukrainian city near nuclear plant
Adam Schreck – October 6, 2022
KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Russia launched missiles that hit apartment buildings in the southern Ukrainian city of Zaporizhzhia, a local official said Thursday, killing three people and wounding at least 12 in a region that houses Europe’s biggest nuclear power plant and which Moscow illegally annexed.
The two strikes, the first before dawn and another in the morning, damaged more than 40 buildings, local authorities said. The attacks came just hours after Ukraine’s president announced that the country’s military had retaken three more villages in another of the four regions annexed by Russia, the latest battlefield reversal for Moscow.
The Zaporizhzhia region’s governor, Oleksandr Starukh wrote on Telegram that many people were rescued from the multi-story buildings, including a 3-year-old girl who was taken to a hospital for treatment.
Photos provided by the Emergency Service of Ukraine showed rescuers scrambling through rubble in the wreckage of a building looking for survivors.
Starukh said of Russia: “The terrorist country has shown its beastly face by converting defense weapons into offensive weapons and killing peacefully sleeping people.”
Zaporizhzhia is one of the regions of Ukraine that Russian President Vladimir Putin claimed as Russian territory in violation of international laws and is home to a nuclear plant that is under Russian occupation. The city of the same name remains under Ukrainian control.
The head of the U.N.’s atomic energy watchdog is expected to visit Kyiv this week to discuss the situation at the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant after Putin signed a decree Wednesday declaring that Russia was taking over the six-reactor facility.
Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry called the move a criminal act and said it considered Putin’s decree “null and void.” The state nuclear operator, Energoatom, said it would continue to operate the plant.
Rafael Grossi, the director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, plans to discuss efforts to set up a secure protection zone around the facility, which has been damaged during Russia’s war in Ukraine and seen staff, including its director, abducted by Russian troops.
Grossi plans to travel to Moscow for talks with Russian officials after his stop in Ukraine.
The U.S. government sent its international development chief to Kyiv on Thursday, the highest-ranking American official to visit Ukraine since Russia illegally annexed the four regions.
The head of the U.S. Agency for International Development, Samantha Power, was holding meetings with government officials and residents. She said the U.S. would provide an additional $55 million to repair heating pipes and other equipment.
USAID said the United States had delivered $9.89 billion in aid to Ukraine since February. A spending bill signed by U.S. President Joe Biden last week promises another $12.3 billion directed both at military and public services needs. Power said Washington plans to release the first $4.5 billion of that funding in the coming weeks.
Meanwhile, leaders from more than 40 European countries met in Prague on Thursday to launch a “political community” aimed at boosting security and prosperity across the continent.
“What you will see here is that Europe stands in solidarity against the Russian invasion in Ukraine,”further land grabs in Ukraine.
Speaking in a conference call with reporters, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Wednesday that “certain territories will be reclaimed, and we will keep consulting residents who would be eager to embrace Russia.”
The precise borders of the areas Moscow is claiming remain unclear, but Putin has vowed to defend Russia’s territory — including the annexed Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk and Zaporizhzhia regions of Ukraine — with any means at his military’s disposal, including nuclear weapons.
The deputy head of the Ukraine president’s office, Kyrylo Tymoshenko, said 10 people were killed in the latest Russian attacks in the Dnipro, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions. It was not clear if that number included those killed in the morning strikes in Zaporizhzhia.
In his nightly video address, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said the Ukrainian army recaptured three more villages in the Kherson region. Novovoskrysenske, Novohryhorivka, and Petropavlivka are all situated northeast of Kherson.
Ukrainian forces are seizing back villages in Kherson in humiliating battlefield defeats for Russian forces that have badly dented the image of a powerful Russian military and added to the tensions surrounding an ill-planned mobilization. They have also fueled fighting among Kremlin insiders and left Putin increasingly cornered.
On Wednesday, the Ukrainian military said the Ukrainian flag was raised above seven Kherson region villages previously occupied by the Russians. The closest of the liberated villages to the city of Kherson is Davydiv Brid, some 100 kilometers (60 miles) away.
Ukraine also was seeking to press a counteroffensive in the Donetsk region, which has been partly controlled by Moscow-backed separatists since 2014 yet remains contested despite Putin’s proclaimed annexation.
When Russian troops pulled back from the Donetsk city of Lyman over the weekend, they retreated so rapidly that they left behind the bodies of their comrades. Some were still lying by the side of the road leading into the city on Wednesday.
Lyman sustained heavy damage both during the occupation and as Ukrainian soldiers fought to retake it. Mykola, a 71-year-old man who gave only his first name, was among about 100 residents who lined up for aid on Wednesday.
“We want the war to come to an end, the pharmacy and shops and hospitals to start working as they used to,” he said. “Now we don’t have anything yet. Everything is destroyed and pillaged, a complete disaster.”
In his nightly address, a defiant Zelenskyy switched to speaking Russian to tell the Moscow leadership that it has already lost the war that it launched Feb. 24.
“You have lost because even now, on the 224th day of full-scale war, you have to explain to your society why this is all necessary.”
He said Ukrainians know what they are fighting for.
“And more and more citizens of Russia are realizing that they must die simply because one person does not want to end the war,” Zelenskyy said.
The Chief Intelligence Directorate of the Ministry of Defence of Ukraine says that more than 2,000 Russian soldiers have contacted them over the past few weeks asking for an opportunity to surrender.
Source: Andrii Yusov, representative of Ukraine’s military intelligence, on the Freedom TV channel
Details: Yusov said there had been a surge of requests after the successful counteroffensive by the Armed Forces of Ukraine in Kharkiv Oblast and the announcement of partial mobilisation in the Russian Federation.
Quote: “Then we started getting phone calls not just from soldiers who were on the territory of Ukraine as part of the occupation army, but also those who had just been mobilised and were still on the territory of the Russian Federation, or their relatives, or even people who suspected that they might be mobilised and were checking just in case.
In a few weeks, we have already [received] more than 2,000 such requests.”
Background: The state project called I Want to Live is designed to help military personnel of the Russian army safely surrender to the Armed Forces of Ukraine.
To receive information on how to surrender, Russian military personnel or their relatives and friends should call the 24-hour numbers:
+38 066 580 34 98;
+38 093 119 29 84.
Russians are guaranteed civilized treatment, in line with the norms of the Geneva Conventions.
Russia’s Small Nuclear Arms: A Risky Option for Putin and Ukraine Alike
David E. Sanger and William J. Broad – October 4, 2022
FILE – In this April 9, 2019 file photo, Russian President Vladimir Putin gestures while speaking at a plenary session of the International Arctic Forum in St. Petersburg, Russia. Putin’s threats to use “all the means at our disposal” to defend his country as it wages war in Ukraine have cranked up global fears that he might use his nuclear arsenal, with the world’s largest stockpile of warheads. (AP Photo, File) (ASSOCIATED PRESS)
WASHINGTON — For all his threats to fire tactical nuclear arms at Ukrainian targets, President Vladimir Putin of Russia is now discovering what the United States itself concluded years ago, U.S. officials suspect: Small nuclear weapons are hard to use, harder to control and a far better weapon of terror and intimidation than a weapon of war.
Analysts inside and outside the government who have tried to game out Putin’s threats have come to doubt how useful such arms — delivered in an artillery shell or thrown in the back of a truck — would be in advancing his objectives.
The primary utility, many U.S. officials say, would be as part of a last-ditch effort by Putin to halt the Ukrainian counteroffensive, by threatening to make parts of Ukraine uninhabitable. The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe some of the most sensitive discussions inside the administration.
The scenarios of how the Russians might do it vary widely. They could fire a shell 6 inches wide from an artillery gun on Ukrainian soil, or a half-ton warhead from a missile located over the border in Russia. The targets could be a Ukrainian military base or a small city. How much destruction — and lingering radiation — would result depends on factors including the size of the weapon and the winds. But even a small nuclear explosion could cause thousands of deaths and render a base or a downtown area uninhabitable for years.
Still, the risks for Putin could easily outweigh any gains. His country could become an international pariah, and the West would try to capitalize on the detonation to try to bring China and India, and others who are still buying Russian oil and gas, into sanctions they have resisted. Then there is the problem of prevailing winds: The radiation released by Russian weapons could easily blow back into Russian territory.
For months now, computer simulations from the Pentagon, U.S. nuclear labs and intelligence agencies have been trying to model what might happen and how the United States could respond. It is no easy task because tactical weapons come in many sizes and varieties, most with a small fraction of the destructive power of the bombs the United States dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.
In a fiery speech last week full of bluster and menace, Putin said those bombings “created a precedent.”
The modeling results, one official familiar with the effort said, vary dramatically — depending on whether Putin’s target is a remote Ukrainian military base, a small city or a “demonstration” blast over the Black Sea.
Great secrecy surrounds Russia’s arsenal of tactical arms, but they vary in size and power. The weapon Europeans worry the most about is the heavy warhead that fits atop an Iskander-M missile and could reach cities in Western Europe. Russian figures put the smallest nuclear blast from the Iskander payload at roughly one-third of the Hiroshima bomb’s explosive power.
Much more is known about the tactical weapons designed for the U.S. arsenal back in the Cold War. One made in the late 1950s, called the Davy Crockett after the frontiersman who died at the Alamo, weighed about 70 pounds; it looked like a large watermelon with four fins. It was designed to be shot from the back of a jeep and had about one-thousandth of the power of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
But as the Cold War progressed, both the United States and the Soviets developed hundreds of variants. There were nuclear depth charges to take out submarines and rumors of “suitcase nukes.” At one point in the 1970s, NATO had upward of 7,400 tactical nuclear weapons, nearly four times the current estimated Russian stockpile.
By that time, they were also part of popular culture. In 1964, James Bond defused a small nuclear weapon in “Goldfinger,” seconds before it was supposed to go off. In 2002, in “The Sum of All Fears,” based on a Tom Clancy novel, a terrorist wipes out Baltimore with a tactical weapon that arrives on a cargo ship.
The reality, though, was that while the blast might be smaller than a conventional weapon would produce, the radioactivity would be long-lasting.
On land, the radiation effects “would be very persistent,” said Michael G. Vickers, the Pentagon’s former top civilian official for counterinsurgency strategy. In the 1970s, Vickers was trained to infiltrate Soviet lines with a backpack-sized nuclear bomb.
Russia’s tactical arms “would most likely be used against enemy force concentrations to stave off a conventional defeat,” Vickers added. But he said his experience suggests “their strategic utility would be highly questionable, given the consequences Russia would almost assuredly face after their use.”
For deadly radiation, there is only one dramatic, real-life comparison on Ukrainian soil: what happened in 1986 when one of the four Chernobyl reactors suffered a meltdown and explosions that destroyed the reactor building.
At the time, the prevailing winds blew from the south and southeast, sending clouds of radioactive debris mostly into Belarus and Russia, although lesser amounts were detected in other parts of Europe, especially Sweden and Denmark.
The radiation dangers from small nuclear arms would likely be less than those involving large reactors, like those at Chernobyl. Its radioactive fallout poisoned the flatlands for miles around and turned villages into ghost towns. Eventually the radiation caused thousands of cases of cancer, although exactly how many is a matter of debate.
The ground around the deactivated plant is still somewhat contaminated, which made it all the more remarkable that the Russians provided little protection to troops that moved through the area in the early days of Moscow’s failed bid to seize Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, in February and March.
Chernobyl, of course, was an accident. The detonation of a tactical weapon would be a choice — and likely an act of desperation. While Putin’s repeated atomic threats may come as a shock to Americans who have barely thought about nuclear arms in recent decades, they have a long history.
In some respects, Putin is following a playbook written by the United States nearly 70 years ago, as it planned how to defend Germany and the rest of Europe in case of a large-scale Soviet invasion.
The idea was to use the tactical weapons to slow an invasion force. Colin Powell, the former secretary of state and chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recalled being sent to Germany in 1958 as a young platoon leader, where his primary responsibility was tending to what he described in his memoir as “a 280-millimeter atomic cannon carried on twin truck-tractors, looking like a World War I Big Bertha.”
Decades later, he told a reporter “it was crazy” to think that the strategy to keep Western Europe free was for the United States and its NATO allies to risk using dozens or hundreds of nuclear weapons, on European soil, against advancing forces.
The very name “tactical weapons” is meant to differentiate these small arms from the giant “city busters” that the United States, the Soviets and other nuclear-armed states mounted on intercontinental missiles and pointed at one another from silos, submarines and bomber fleets. It was the huge weapons — far more powerful than what destroyed Hiroshima — that prompted fear of Armageddon, and of a single strike that could take out New York or Los Angeles. Tactical weapons, in contrast, might collapse a few city blocks or stop an oncoming column of troops. But they would not destroy the world.
Ultimately, the large “strategic weapons” became the subject of arms control treaties, and currently the United States and Russia are limited to 1,550 deployed weapons each. But the smaller tactical weapons have never been regulated.
And the logic of deterrence that surrounded the intercontinental missiles — that a strike on New York would result in a strike on Moscow — never fully applied to the smaller weapons. After the Sept. 11 attacks, the Bush administration feared that a terrorist group like al-Qaida might get a nuclear weapon and use it to destroy the New York subways or irradiate downtown Washington.
The CIA went to great lengths to determine whether al-Qaida or the Taliban had obtained the technology for small nuclear bombs, and the Obama administration held a series of “nuclear summits” with world leaders to reduce the amount of loose nuclear material that could be turned into a small weapon or dirty bomb, essentially radioactive waste that could be dispersed around a few city blocks.
As the Cold War ended, NATO admitted publicly to what insiders had long concluded, that the rationale for any nuclear use was exceedingly remote and that the West could dramatically reduce its nuclear forces. Slowly it removed most of its tactical nuclear weapons, determining they were of little military value.
Roughly 100 are still kept in Europe, mostly to appease NATO nations that worry about Russia’s arsenal, estimated at 2,000 or so weapons.
Now the question is whether Putin would actually use them.
The possibility that he would has sent strategists back to examine a war doctrine known as “escalate to de-escalate” — meaning routed Russian troops would fire a nuclear weapon to stun an aggressor into retreat or submission. That is the “escalate” part; if the enemy retreated, Russia could then “de-escalate.”
Of late, Moscow has used its tactical arsenal as a backdrop for threats, bullying and bluster. Nina Tannenwald, a political scientist at Brown University who studies nuclear arms, recently noted that Putin first raised the threat of turning to his nuclear weapons in 2014 during Russia’s invasion of Crimea. She added that, in 2015, Russia threatened Danish warships with nuclear destruction if Denmark were to join NATO’s system for fending off missile strikes. In late February, Putin called for his nuclear forces to go on alert; there is no evidence they ever did.
Last week, the Institute for the Study of War concluded that “Russian nuclear use would therefore be a massive gamble for limited gains that would not achieve Putin’s stated war aims. At best, Russian nuclear use would freeze the front lines in their current position and enable the Kremlin to preserve its currently occupied territory in Ukraine.” Even that, it concluded, would take “multiple tactical nuclear weapons.”
But it would not, the institute concluded, “enable Russian offensives to capture the entirety of Ukraine.” Which was, of course, Putin’s original goal.
How the US might respond to a Russian nuclear attack in Ukraine
Ellen Mitchell – October 4, 2022
As concerns grow over Russian President Vladimir Putin’s nuclear saber-rattling amid continued losses in Ukraine, what a U.S. response would look like has become an increasingly urgent question.
U.S. officials since the start of Russia’s attack on Ukraine have stressed there are plans being developed to counter a range of moves by Moscow but have kept specifics under wraps.
While the administration says there are no signs that the Kremlin has made moves toward a nuclear strike — and that Washington has not changed its own nuclear position — experts say the potential U.S. options could turn into a very real scenario given Russia’s floundering military campaign and an increasingly frustrated Putin.
Mark Cancian, a former Pentagon official-turned-defense expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said a U.S. response to a major Russian attack would be twofold — one military and one diplomatic.
“If the Ukrainians kept fighting, we would continue our flow of aid and we’d probably take the gloves off” in terms of weapons provided to Kyiv, he told The Hill.
At the top of Ukraine’s wish list is the Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS), a surface-to-surface missile that can travel four times farther than anything Kyiv has now in its fight against Russia. The embattled country has pressed the U.S. for the system for months, but Washington has been hesitant to provide it over fears it could escalate the conflict.
However, should Moscow use a tactical nuclear weapon on Ukrainian troops or civilians, or even detonate such a device away from populated areas, Cancian predicted the administration would finally allow Kyiv to have ATACMS or “anything else they wanted” to go after Russian targets.
On the diplomatic side of things, meanwhile, Russian use of nuclear weapons could very well prompt countries such as India, China and Turkey — the latter a NATO ally — to put pressure on Putin economically, according to Cancian.
“A nuclear strike would really, I think, put them under a lot of pressure to go along with the sanctions and take a tougher line towards Russia, so Russia would lose these lifelines that they’ve been clinging to and nurturing,” he said.
National security adviser Jake Sullivan last week said there would be “catastrophic consequences” should Moscow deploy nuclear weapons and said a more specific ultimatum had been delivered to Moscow privately.
President Biden has said since the start of the war that U.S. troops will not be sent to Ukraine, and experts warn that a nuclear response to a nuclear attack could quickly escalate into a nuclear world war.
Retired Gen. David Petraeus offered a prediction of how the U.S. would respond to a Russian nuclear attack on Sunday, though he noted that he had deliberately avoided speaking with Sullivan about it.
“I mean, just to give you a hypothetical, we would respond by leading a NATO, a collective effort, that 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,” he said.
Laura Cooper, the deputy assistant secretary of Defense for Russia, Ukraine and Eurasia, said Tuesday that U.S. officials “have continually consulted with allies about the Russia threat, and the nuclear threat that Russia poses is just one aspect of that, and certainly the NATO forum is our premier forum for consultation on these issues.”
One Austrian official told The Hill that it’s offered the country as a neutral ground for difficult negotiations and is ready to host de-escalation talks and maintain channels with Russia.
Though Putin’s national televised speech last month was not his first time raising the specter of nuclear war, current and former U.S. officials have raised new alarms over the Kremlin’s increasingly bellicose nuclear rhetoric as it moves to annex four regions of Ukraine.
Putin threatened on Aug. 21 that Moscow would deploy its massive nuclear arsenal to protect Russian territory or its people — which could now include the four Russian-occupied Ukrainian regions. However, both Kyiv and Washington have said they will not be deterred from continued fighting to take back those regions.
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, in an interview with CNN aired Sunday, said that while he hasn’t seen intelligence to suggest the Russian leader has chosen to use nuclear weapons, “there are no checks on Mr. Putin.”
“To be clear, the guy who makes that decision, I mean, it’s one man,” Austin said.
John Kirby, the National Security Council’s coordinator for strategic communications, said Monday that the U.S. is “closely” watching Russian activity at the Zaporizhzhia power plant — another location Putin could choose to attack to escalate the war.
And former national security adviser H.R. McMaster on Sunday said Putin is “under extreme pressure” due to battlefield failures and domestic outcry over a mobilization order that could send hundreds of thousands of reservists into the war.
“I think the message to [Putin] is If you use a nuclear weapon, it’s a suicide weapon. And the response from NATO and the United States doesn’t have to be nuclear,” McMaster told “Face the Nation” host Margaret Brennan on CBS.
Fears were further stoked this week when an online video emerged of a train in Russia appearing to carry equipment from a Kremlin military unit that handles nuclear weapons. The video, which Pentagon officials could not confirm, shows military vehicles allegedly from the secretive 12th Main Directorate of the Russian ministry of defense being transported on the train, according to Konrad Muzyka, an aerospace and defense analyst focused on Russia and Belarus.
The Kremlin unit is responsible for nuclear munitions, their storage, maintenance, transport and issuance, Muzyka tweeted Sunday.
“I have seen these reports. I have nothing to corroborate,” Cooper told reporters Tuesday when asked about the video.
Pressed on whether the Pentagon has seen anything to indicate that Russia is contemplating the use of nuclear weapons, she said officials “have certainly heard the saber rattling from Putin” but “see no signs that would cause us to alter our posture.”
Cooper also declined to answer questions on whether the U.S. has seen any movement of Russia’s nuclear forces, citing the protection of U.S. intelligence.
Some, including Rep. Mike Turner (R-Ohio), ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, have urged the administration to increase its nuclear readiness in Europe and move additional missile defense assets into the region.
“This administration needs to step up its game on missile defense,” Turner said on Fox News over the weekend. “We have assets in Europe, and we need to engage them so that we can provide protection to our allies.”
Much speculation has also been given as to the exact kind of weapon Putin might potentially use, with fears he could resort to using tactical nuclear weapons — meant to be used in a battle or on a specific population center to try to bring an end to the conflict.
“We always have to try to take the threat of nuclear use seriously and so we do, and that’s why we are watching very closely, and that’s why we do consult closely with allies,” Cooper said.
“But at the same time, at this point, [Russia’s] rhetoric is only rhetoric, and it’s irresponsible saber-rattling that we see at this point,” Cooper said.
For now, the U.S. will respond to Russian aggression by continuing to pour weapons and other aid into Ukraine, including four more of the advanced rocket systems Kyiv has credited with greatly helping its offensive begun at the start of this month.
The soon-to-be delivered High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems — used by the Ukrainians to target bridges, roads and munition storage areas Russia uses to supply its forces — are part of a new $625 million lethal aid package announced Tuesday.
Asked later on Tuesday whether the United States will provide anything to help the Ukrainians protect themselves against a possible nuclear strike, Cooper said Washington has already provided “a considerable amount of protective equipment against chemical, biological and radiological threats.”
She pointed to a military aid package from earlier this year that included “a number of personal protective equipment items” as well as “significant quantities” of such equipment given as part of the Cooperative Threat Reduction Program.
