by UWE PARPART & DAVID P. GOLDMAN
Putin and his high command reportedly have decamped to secret bunkers after threat to use nuclear weapons
What does Vladimir Putin have to do to convince Washington that the Ukraine crisis is a preliminary skirmish in what might be a nuclear war? On February 23, Putin warned of nuclear war. On February 19, he conducted a full-dress drill of Russian ballistic missile forces. On February 27, he put Russia on a nuclear alert — which remains in effect.
Joe Biden didn’t get the message.
Then on March 29, Moscow sent a red-alarm signal to the West by leaking news that “Putin and his high command have decamped to secret bunkers, following a Kremlin statement that Russia would use nuclear weapons to counter an ‘existential threat,’” the Daily Mail reported, citing investigations by journalist Christo Grozev.
Grozev claims that tracking of aircraft used by top Russian officials shows that Putin may have left Moscow for a bunker near Surgut, in western Siberia. Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu allegedly is in a bunker near Ufa in the Urals, 725 miles east of Moscow.
That may have been Russia’s response to US President Biden’s shocking declaration in Poland March 26 that Putin “cannot remain in power” – a declaration of US intent to force regime change in Russia, a threat that exceeded any made by the United States at any time during the Cold War. US officials tried to walk back Biden’s threat, but the Biden Administration’s obsession with deposing Putin had already been reported widely before Biden blurted it out.
Historian Niall Ferguson, the authorized biographer of Henry Kissinger, made that clear in a March 22 essay for Bloomberg News, quoting a senior administration official’s remark that “The only end game now is the end of the Putin regime.”
Putin warned the West in his televised address on February 23, on the eve of Russia’s move into Ukraine, “No matter who tries to stand in our way or all the more so create threats for our country and our people, they must know that Russia will respond immediately, and the consequences will be such as you have never seen in your entire history. No matter how the events unfold, we are ready.”
For Russia, the issue of NATO’s expansion into Ukraine from the beginning has been positioning for nuclear war. Putin warned on February 23 that “positioning areas for interceptor missiles are being established in Romania and Poland as part of the US project to create a global missile defense system. It is common knowledge that the launchers deployed there can be used for Tomahawk cruise missiles – offensive strike systems…. In other words, the allegedly defensive US missile defense system is developing and expanding its new offensive capabilities.”
The Russian leader added, “The information we have gives us good reason to believe that Ukraine’s accession to NATO and the subsequent deployment of NATO facilities has already been decided and is only a matter of time [and] American strategic planning documents confirm the possibility of a so-called preemptive strike at enemy missile systems. We also know the main adversary of the United States and NATO. It is Russia… Ukraine will serve as an advanced bridgehead for such a strike.”
Ballistic missiles stationed in Ukraine, Putin added, can hit Moscow in seven minutes, and hypersonic weapons in four minutes. “It is like a knife to the throat. I have no doubt that they hope to carry out these plans, as they did many times in the past, expanding NATO eastward, moving their military infrastructure to Russian borders and fully ignoring our concerns, protests, and warnings.”
This is not a dispute about slivers of Ukrainian territory on Russia’s border, or a contest between authoritarian Russia and ostensibly democratic Ukraine. Nor is it a limited nuclear war scenario of the kind that war planners began gaming under 1960s Defense Secretary Robert McNamara—war games that the American side lost in every round.
Asia Times for more