Zelensky Once More Puts Allies Under Nuclear Shadow
A new central flashpoint around the issue of Ukraine obtaining nuclear weapons has suddenly taken hold of the narrative after Zelensky appeared to imply that Ukraine’s future can only be secured either via NATO or nuclear weapons. In fact, he said that’s what he explained to Trump and may be the real root kernel of his ‘Victory Plan’:
Julian Roepcke at BILD went on to report that some high-ranking Ukrainian official disclosed that if given the order, Ukraine can build a nuke “within a matter of weeks”:
The Official specializing in weapons procurement, said in a closed round: "We have the Material, we have the Knowledge. If there is, the arrangement, we need only a few weeks until the first bomb.“
The West should be "less about Russia's red lines, instead of thinking a lot more about our red lines," the warning of the Official.
He was forced to defend himself after another round of backlash:
However, after the report caused a firestorm, Zelensky’s press office was forced to issue an official refutation of Roepcke’s statements:
The Office of the President of Ukraine denied reports of the tabalid Bild that the Ukrainian authorities are allegedly seriously considering the possibility of restoring nuclear stockpiles.
According to Dmytro Lytvyn, adviser to President Volodymyr Zelensky, it has long been possible to confuse where the words of military columnists Bild Julian Röpack, and where are the statements of Russian propagandists, writes Channel 24.
"Therefore, both Röpke and Russian propaganda "throw the same nonsense into the information space," he added.
Interestingly, the above publication also notes the following, insinuating that as a last desperate line of defense Ukraine would rapidly obtain nukes if Russia were to assault Kiev again:
According to Bild analyst Julian Röpke, Zelensky's statement came as a “shock” to Western journalists. He claims that a few months ago, a senior Ukrainian official allegedly told the publication and other members of a narrow circle of politicians and officials that Ukraine would not accept a second Russian army offensive on Kyiv.
“We have materials, we have knowledge. If there is an order, it will take us only a few weeks to get the first bomb. The West should “think less about Russia's red lines and much more about our red lines,” the Ukrainian official said, according to the journalist.
Zelensky himself immediately began to walk back his statements after realizing the hot-water he may have landed himself in with his sponsors:
First a couple quick obligatory clarifications. Zelensky himself continues to spout the debunked lie that Ukraine “gave up its nuclear weapons” during the Budapest Memorandum.
Here’s the truth again:
Ukraine never had control over those nukes. Secondly, it was revealed that it was actually the US itself rather than Russia that forced Ukraine to give up its nukes during that period, not wanting live nukes to fall into the hands of some failed state. Sure, Ukraine would not have been able to launch them, but could have potentially cracked them open and sold the enriched plutonium to bad actors on the black market.
The next thing, which I’ll preface with this quote from Andrey Kartapolov:
The head of the State Duma defense committee commented on the possibility of Ukraine creating nuclear weapons. It is absolutely impossible; they do not have the competences, materials and equipment. Statements that nuclear weapons can be made from waste for nuclear fuel are fairy tales for the poorly educated, - said Andrej.
He added that Ukraine could make a "dirty bomb", but Russia is considering all possibilities. If we assume that it can be given to them secretly, then this is also excluded, because there is a certain technique that allows you to immediately determine where the special ammunition was created. So goodbye America then, - added Andrej.
Putin added a somewhat confused or ambiguous thought to the above:
He says it’s not that hard, but it’s not that easy to build nuclear weapons in today’s world. It may depend on what exactly we’re talking about. A “dirty bomb” or very crudely ineffective weapon can likely be done fairly easily. But highly refined nuclear weapons are very difficult as evidenced by the fact that the US hardly even possesses the ability anymore to create nuclear pits or plutonium ‘cores’.
I wrote about this in the recent paywalled article which I’ve decided to open up to free subscribers now:
Not only can you get an indepth look at US’ own troubled nuclear industry and its struggles with restarting the ability to manufacture nuclear weapons, but you can also get a glimpse of our paywalled series here as enticement to become a paid subscriber.
An excerpt:
"But mostly because of the Los Alamos lab's safety deficiencies, it hasn't produced a usable new warhead core in at least six years. Congress mandated in the 2015 National Defense Authorization Act that Los Alamos must be capable of manufacturing up to 20 war-ready cores a year by 2025, 30 the next year and 80 by 2027. Wolf said the agency remains committed to meeting this goal, but other government officials say the dramatic slowdown at PF-4 has put fulfillment of that timetable in doubt."
So, as I asked on X—the US is struggling with producing warheads but Ukraine “easily” can in a matter of weeks? I can only logically chalk such a statement up to a reference to ‘dirty bombs’, which is just a crude regular bomb with pieces of defunct uranium/plutonium on it to create contamination.
Also, the bomb itself is nearly the least important part—the delivery system is really what matters. Does Ukraine have a way to deliver a nuclear bomb to the heart of Russia? Not really—thus what can they really do, create nuclear IEDs or backpack bombs, or perhaps some tactical nuke at best? Such a thing would be folly because it would not gravely harm Russia but would incur a massive nuclear response that would end Ukraine’s existence.
Russian correspondent Roman Alyokhin suggested that Ukraine already has a nuclear “dirty bomb”:
Well of course, those are very easy to make. Ukraine has nuclear power plants and it’s easy to take some uranium fuel from them and use it as fragmentary shrapnel to line the explosive with.
But Putin did also say, under no circumstances would Ukraine be allowed to obtain nukes:
Just look at this frame grab of Putin’s face when he says Ukraine will never be allowed to have nukes—it tells the whole story of Russia’s stance:
Lavrov chimed in:
But here’s where it gets interesting, and where we tie everything together, answering the question of why Zelensky is playing this game now.
Some reports claim Zelensky gave partners “three months” to adopt the plan:
Although this could be a creative extrapolation of Zelensky emphasizing the start of next year, but it does highlight his recent urgency. What can three months bring? For one, in exactly three months the next president of the US is sworn in, and this time limit could be a sort of final marker for Zelensky who seems to be convinced that Trump will sell him down the river.
But the hint to another interpretation could lie in Slovakia’s Robert Fico’s recent statement:
Listen very carefully: he states that Ukraine “suspects something is coming”, and he doesn’t want to say what it is, but it will bring an end to the war ‘soon’. He alludes to the cancellation of the Ramstein meeting as one hint.
This was reinforced by an important new thread from journalist Kit Klarenberg which reveals that a UK advisor named John Bew has played a kind of eminence grise or ‘oracle’ role in the Ukrainian war, giving citations for that claim. But here’s the big kicker. According to him, the Kursk operation was entirely a British one—which does accord with facts—and:
Starmer planned a major international charm offensive to get allies on board with Ukraine striking Russia, increased arms shipments, increased defence spending, the works. And Bew was central to this strategy. He was dispatched to Kiev personally to coordinate with Zelensky et al
In short, it was the UK’s last-ditch effort to compound some Ukrainian consensus and get a critical mass of support going, riding the ‘victory wave’ of what was to be a huge triumph. But the massive failure of Kursk appears to have unleashed the opposite, with the “oracle” John Bew abruptly but quietly resigning means—akin to Nuland’s foreboding departure—the whole British effort has collapsed:
So, Bew's abrupt departure hints entire strategy has been dropped. Important to note Bew has done a lot of work on "strengthening ties" with the US. It was no doubt hoped by Starmer he'd get Washington onside. And he failed. Now the UK won't endorse Zelensky's 'victory plan'.
So, putting the pieces together. With Zelensky’s sudden “three month” urgency, his desperate threats of obtaining nukes, a schizo psyop about North Korean troops to drum up panic, Robert Fico’s ‘mysterious’ intimations of something big coming that will end the war, and many other small crumbs like the John Bew bailing bellwether—what do you get?
What the potpourri of intel seems to suggest to me, is everyone is sensing an end to the conflict, and Zelensky must have advanced warning that “support” could collapse even further—for instance with Trump now certain to win. As such, Zelensky could be on his last leg in designing a threat to change the calculus.
But here’s the angle most casual observers will miss: the nuclear threat is not toward Russia.
You see, Russia isn’t worried about any low-grade, small yield dirty bomb. Why? Because if Ukraine dared use anything of the sort, Russia could nuke Ukraine to the stone age with impunity—meaning: no ally would come to Ukraine’s defense given the knowledge Ukraine used a nuke first. As such, this threat is meaningless toward Russia.
No, the threat is against Ukraine’s allies. It’s Zelensky’s long-awaited blackmail of his own “partners” with the message effectively being: “If you don’t save us, we’ll use nukes to force a confrontation between you and Russia, and burn the whole world down with us.”
Here Defense Minister Umerov suggests he’d do “a lot of bad things” if NATO forced them to exchange territories—innocent tongue-in-cheek jest or a sinister peek under the veil?
The problem is, it’s mostly too little too late, and as I said no ally would take his bait and risk nuclear war against Russia if Ukraine had acted first. This was hinted at recently in a new much-talked-about book by “legendary journalist” Bob Woodward just released three days ago:
WASHINGTON (AP) — Months into Russia's war in Ukraine, the United States had intelligence pointing to “highly sensitive, credible conversations inside the Kremlin” that President Vladimir Putin was seriously considering using nuclear weapons to avoid major battlefield losses, journalist Bob Woodward reported in his new book, “War.”
The U.S. intelligence pointed to a 50% chance that Putin would use tactical nukes if Ukrainian forces surrounded 30,000 Russian troops in the southern city of Kherson, the book says. Just months before, in the far northeast, Ukrainian troops had stunned the Russians by recapturing Kharkiv, Ukraine's second-largest city, and were pivoting to liberate Kherson, strategically located on the Dnieper River not far from the Black Sea.
National security adviser Jake Sullivan stared “with dread” at the intelligence assessment — described as coming from the best sources and methods — in late September 2022, seven months after Russia's invasion, the book says. It caused alarm across the Biden administration, moving the chance of Russia using nukes up from 5% to 10% to now 50%.
According to Woodward's account, President Joe Biden told Sullivan to "get on the line with the Russians. Tell them what we will do in response.”
He said to use language that was threatening but not too strong, the book says. Biden also reached out to Putin directly in a message, warning of the “catastrophic consequences” if Russia used nuclear weapons.
The famed Watergate reporter’s latest book also details Donald Trump's conversations with Putin since leaving office, Biden’s frustrations with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and more. The Associated Press obtained an early copy of Woodward's book, which is due out next week.
The other now famous exchange from the book:
In another heated conversation laid out in Woodward’s book, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin confronted his Russian counterpart, Sergei Shoigu, in October 2022.
“We know you are contemplating the use of tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine,” Austin said, according to Woodward. “Any use of nuclear weapons on any scale against anybody would be seen by the United States and the world as a world-changing event. There is no scale of nuclear weapons that we could overlook or that the world could overlook.”
As Shoigu listened, Austin pressed on, noting that the U.S. had not given Ukraine certain weapons and had restricted the use of some of those it had provided. He warned that those constraints would be reconsidered. He also noted that China, India, Turkey and Israel would isolate Russia if it used nuclear weapons.
“I don’t take kindly to being threatened,” Shoigu responded, the book says.
“Mr. Minister,” Austin said. “I am the leader of the most powerful military in the history of the world. I don’t make threats.”
The point is that the US was apparently extremely spooked and took the threat of nuclear use very seriously. This is now being used as explanation for why, precisely, Biden has been so careful of Russia’s red lines since that time, and has refused to allow Ukraine to strike deep into Russian territory. Something about that early exchange must have really convinced them that Russia was in fact prepared to use tactical nukes. Zelensky knowing this could be playing the nuke card in order to bait out a Russian nuclear response, or at least a preliminary one—like the preparation of tactical nukes for combat use—in order to stir up provocation and confrontation.
This last poignant take underscores the above. Biden was convinced that going too hard on Russia would back it into a corner and raise the nuclear stakes, which ironically is one of the accusations levied by the Ukrainian side for a long time now—that the US has been too scared to “defeat” Russia in full:
Back in 2022, the White House realized that they were “stuck” in the war in Ukraine.
This is stated in the book “War” by American journalist Bob Woodward, which publishes private conversations of American politicians.
It is reported that in November 2022, President Biden and his adviser Sullivan had a conversation regarding the prospects for conflict.
“If we do not expel Russia completely from Ukraine, then to some extent we will allow Putin to achieve what he wants. And if we manage to kick them out, we risk nuclear war. Putin will not allow himself to be driven out of here without the use of nuclear weapons. So we're stuck. Too much success - nuclear, too little - incomprehensible long-term consequences,” Woodward reports Biden’s words.
Thus, the most desirable outcome of the war for the US leadership is either to get Putin to agree to freeze the conflict, or to wait for something to break down in Russia itself, according to the book cited by the Babel publication.
Earlier from the book it became known that the United States, against the backdrop of its defeats in Ukraine, in the fall of 2022.
At the risk of going on too far a tangent, I wanted to shoehorn in this new debate hosted by the Duran, between John Helmer and Gilbert Doctorow, which is a continuation of the piece by John Helmer I posted last time:
It is very good viewing and covers the early part of the war where Russia was apparently flummoxed between the differing demands of the late 2021 general staff letter and the subsequently much softer April 2022 Putin Istanbul ‘agreement’.
The reason it ties with the above is that there is a chance that Russia may have been in worse shape than we thought back then, in terms of troop counts, etc., and as such would explain both Putin’s seeming softening of terms for ceasefire as well as the nuclear rhetoric from the general staff. It could explain why Russian troops were “allowed” to withdraw so quietly over Kherson without any losses wherein Ukraine appeared to have the ability to really make it much more difficult for them by destroying the Antinovka bridge with HIMARS at the time and trapping much larger forces on the other side. If Woodward’s claims are true, the nuclear threats may have pushed Biden to lean on Ukraine to not dole out too much damage to withdrawing Russian troops.
However it highlights that Russia’s nuclear threat is taken very seriously by the US, enough to potentially curtail Ukraine’s war effort as per the above example. Therefore, it goes without saying any talk of Ukrainian nuclear provocations would send chills down US’ spine given that US appears convinced Russia will not hesitate to use nukes in response, particularly for that transgression. With the Biden admin desperate not to fall into Zelensky’s trap of being dragged into WWIII against Russia, it becomes clear how Zelensky’s nuclear blackmail here is really aimed primarily at the US.
But the Helmer-Doctorow debate above is worth the watch nonetheless. It starts off rocky with Helmer coming out swinging unnecessarily hard, provoking some irritation from Doctorow, but things patch up from there and get more interesting.
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One other eye-opening addendum to the above is the claimed leak of Zelensky’s “secret appendix” for his grand “Victory Plan”:
The contents of the secret appendix to Zelensky's "victory plan" were published by AMVET - in it, Kiev handed over a list of targets for Storm Shadow, JASSM and Taurus missiles in Russia.
The enemies want to strike in the near future and before winter.
These include gunpowder factories in Kazan, Tambov and Perm, airfields up to 1000 km from the Ukrainian border, military-industrial complex enterprises producing UAVs and missile weapons, as well as headquarters and command posts in Rostov, Voronezh, Moscow, Belgorod, Kursk and St. Petersburg.
The list also includes logistics centers, testing grounds, transport hubs, including the Crimean Bridge, FSB and Russian National Guard headquarters, air defense units at ranges of up to 500 km, weapons depots, the Black Sea Fleet base in Novorossiysk, a command post near Sochi, and a number of federal government agencies "up to 1,000 km from launch sites."
In essence, this is an expanded list of targets from ISW - it goes on to list critical infrastructure in border regions, oil refineries and "mega-terminals" like Pskov, repair shops of the Ministry of Defense and special services.
Earlier, Zelensky proposed a plan for defeating Russia consisting of five main points and three secret ones. Advisor to the head of Zelensky's office, Mykhailo Podolyak, admitted that the secret appendices indicate the necessary weapons and targets for inflicting a strategic defeat on the Russian Federation.
Again we see this dire, urgent need to “strike within three months” or so. One of the likely other reasons for this urgency could be Zelensky’s knowledge that time is running out for his energy grid, as highlighted again by Josep Borrell yesterday who related that 70% of Ukraine’s energy generation is destroyed. On top of that, any time Europe sends new generators they are destroyed the next day by Russia:
The mood is reflected in the latest Military Watch magazine:
Amid fast mounting Ukrainian defeats across multiple fronts, and particularly rapid attrition of the elite contingent sent into Russia’s Kursk region in early August, consensus in the Western world has increasingly shifted towards a highly pessimistic outlook for the future of the joint war effort against Russia. In particular, the advances of Russian forces into parts of the disputed Donbas region that are vital to the survival of what remains of Ukraine’s economy have the potential to bring an end to efforts by the government in Kiev and its Western allies to sustain a NATO-aligned administration in power.
The bottom line is this: Zelensky needs NATO to save Ukraine at all costs, and if they don’t step in, he has no choice but to escalate in a way that threatens to provoke a clash between NATO and Russia. These are all academic, elementary predictions we’ve been making here since last year.
Putin for his part says no Russian territory will be given up in any negotiations:
A few last items:
Putin continues in his statements to the BRICS media group. Here he states Russia is ready to keep fighting until NATO is exhausted:
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Polish PM Tusk says there is no agreement on Ukraine’s “Victory Plan”:
‼️There is no agreement among Ukraine's allies on Zelensky's "victory plan", says Polish PM
▪️"I would not say that there was complete harmony in the context of assessing the victory plan presented by Volodymyr Zelensky, but no one expected this. That is, nothing new happened here - you know, each country has its own opinion on the conflict. In fact, this plan contains only one main thesis - the prospect of NATO membership," Tusk said.
▪️Meanwhile, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz rejected key points of Zelensky's "victory plan" due to fears of further escalation of the war.
▪️And Budapest calls on NATO to limit itself to “diplomatic means.”
▪️Earlier, the White House once again stated that there is no consensus on inviting Ukraine.
—
Ukrainian official says Russia’s awaited Zaporozhye offensive could start as early as next week:
Russia could launch new offensive in the south as early as next week, says Ukrainian official
▪️According to him, active training is being carried out at training grounds near Mariupol and Berdyansk.
▪️Recently, the Russian Army began moving in the Zaporizhzhya direction, liberating the village of Levadnoye
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A brilliant Russian ad mocking the ‘political corpse in Kiev’:
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"“Mr. Minister,” Austin said. “I am the leader of the most powerful military in the history of the world. I don’t make threats.”"
That statement sounds like a fairy tale.
Woodward is Deep State and always has been.
Bottom line- Ukraine is a potty failed ganster state that has become a menace to international peace. Everyone else is better off if Russia takes back the whole of Ukraine and crushes its neo nazi cabal.
The current explosion of threats and menaces seals Ukraine's fate. Whatever the value to the west of all those resources in the east, they are lost. All the west can achieve by continuing to prosecute this war is further losses to itself including some truly dire ones. But Ukraine- as a war zone- has to be shut down. The neo Nazi cabal has to go, and Russia can then organise elections in Ukraine to absorb it into the RF. The west returns all Russia's assets, drops all the sanctions and co-operates with the Russians in achieving peace in this war zone it- the west- created.
This is the only way forward. If the west cannot face the loss of face in agreeing all this, then- at the very least- western europe will confront an horrendous tides of refugees heading into old europe over the winter as the Russians shut down Ukraine as a functioning society-economy. Russia will do what it has to, to bring peace, and Russia's allies understand this. Ironically, this hard nosed Russian courage and determination to bring this war to the only end visible, is what the west must now rely on to bail it out of this mess.