Dmitry Suslov: It’s Time for Russia to Think About a ‘Demonstrative’ Nuclear Test

• Dmitry Suslov: It’s Time for Russia to Think About a ‘Demonstrative’ Nuclear Test
  by Dmitry Suslov, member of the Russian Council on Foreign and Defense Policy, deputy director of World Economy and International Politics at Moscow’s Higher School of Economics, and Valdai Club expert.
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  There’s every indication that the US and several of its allies may soon allow Ukraine to use Western weapons, including long-range missiles, to attack targets located within – how do we put this? – Russia’s internationally recognized borders. Or those that existed before the 2014 Maidan in Kiev.
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  In America, as the New York Times recently reported, backers of the idea include Secretary of State Antony Blinken, most Republicans in Congress (including the Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson), and many members of the foreign policy establishment, including Victoria Nuland, who recently resigned as deputy secretary of state. In Europe, Poland, the Baltic states, Germany’s main opposition party, the CDU/CSU, and some Western European figures, including the head of the UK Foreign Office, David Cameron, are agitating for the measure.
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  Recently, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg made a similar appeal, but he would not have made such statements if the issue had not already been considered on a practical level and had not received substantial support from Washington. It has already come to the point where the topic has been discussed at the level of the heads of defense ministries of EU member states.
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  Such a decision would take the conflict to a fundamentally different level, would mean the erasure of one of the brightest “red lines” that has existed since February 24, 2022, and signal the direct entry of the US and its NATO bloc into the war against Russia. Indeed, the strikes would be carried out on the basis of coordinates provided by Western intelligence systems; the decisions on these strikes would be taken by Western military officers (the media has repeatedly relayed confessions from Ukrainian military officers that every case of Western missile use is coordinated in advance by Western military advisers); and even the button would probably be pressed directly by Western military officers. It is no coincidence that German Chancellor Olaf Scholz justifies his reluctance to transfer Taurus missiles on the grounds that they would have to be operated by German, not Ukrainian, military personnel. 
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