DAILY MAIL
When the Russian winner of the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize, Dmitry Muratov, in an interview with the BBC, warns of the imminent use of nuclear weapons by his country, many in the West will feel at least a twinge of terror — followed by the thought: let’s not provoke Vladimir Putin too much with further military aid to Ukraine.
That is exactly what the Russian President would like us to think — although Muratov is anything but a Putin supporter: the independent newspaper he founded and edited, Novaya Gazeta, has been shut down by the Kremlin.
Muratov told the BBC’s Moscow correspondent, Steve Rosenberg: ‘Two generations have lived without the threat of nuclear war. But this period is over. Will Putin press the nuclear button, or won’t he? Who knows? No one knows this.’
He went on to point out how Russian ‘state propaganda is preparing people to think that nuclear war isn’t a bad thing. On TV channels here, nuclear war and nuclear weapons are promoted as if they’re advertising pet food . . . so that people here are ready.’
It’s true that Russian TV programmes about the war in Ukraine are full of pundits almost salivating about the prospect of ‘destroying’ Britain with nuclear strikes in retaliation for our steadfast military support for the Ukrainians — against a studio backdrop of mushroom clouds over London.
SURVIVAL
Then, last week, Putin announced that Russia would build a facility for tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus, accompanied by a warning from that allied country’s president, Alexander Lukashenko, that if Russia felt its survival was threatened by the way the West had been funnelling arms to Ukraine, Moscow could ‘use the most terrible weapon’.
That these statements followed on from Putin’s warning that Russia would ‘respond accordingly’ after the UK announced it would be supplying Kyiv with Challenger 2 tank shells containing depleted uranium has led some to suggest that London is provoking a dangerous nuclear escalation.
In fact, as Putin knows, such munitions are also used by Russia and have nothing whatever to do with nuclear warfare.
And in a later statement, the Russian president pointed out that the moving of nuclear weapons to Belarus was part of an existing plan ‘outside the context’ of the UK’s supply of depleted uranium shells to Ukraine.
More pertinently still, the facilities that Putin says will be constructed in Belarus take years to build — and there is no sign of any start to them.
In other words, while Putin has repeatedly attempted to use the threat of nuclear war as a deterrent against the West, while our governments consider how to respond to Ukraine’s request for the weapons they need, our media must be careful not to amplify the Kremlin’s threats, or exaggerate their significance.
This point is well made in a paper published by the Chatham House think-tank last week
