The Daily Mail (U.K.) reports the following strange message from Russian state television.
Margarita Simonyan, editor of state broadcaster RT and one of the Kremlin's highest-profile mouthpieces, declared on TV last night that the idea of Putin pressing the red button is 'more probable' than the idea that he will allow Russia to lose the war.
'Either we lose in Ukraine,' she said, 'or the Third World War starts. I think World War Three is more realistic, knowing us, knowing our leader. The most incredible outcome, that all this will end with a nuclear strike, seems more probable to me than the other course of events.
'This is to my horror on one hand,' she told a panel of experts shifting nervously in their seats, 'but on the other hand, it is what it is. We will go to heaven, while they will simply croak... We're all going to die someday.'
Is Simonyan being a fatalist, or trying to bluff the West, or covertly sending a message to fellow Russians “this guy (Putin) is nuts”? I can’t imagine huge numbers of Russians willing to die rather than subjugate Ukraine, which has heretofore been no threat to Russia.
Still, we’ve written before that when an autocrat sets out on a war of conquest, he wins it or mostly he dies. There aren’t a lot of cases where he loses but retires to a villa and lives a long life with grandkids on his knee. I think she’s saying Putin figures if he dies, we all die. Are Russians okay with that calculus or too apathetic to believe they can influence events? I don’t know the answer.
Simonyan is certainly correct we will all die someday, Perhaps like me, you are in no particular hurry for that eventuality to occur. Is the only way we prevent nuclear holocaust if we stop supporting Ukraine? That policy choice doesn’t look likely at the moment.
For another view that imagines an off-ramp that would enable both sides to claim victory of sorts, see Edward Luttwak’s proposal on Unherd.
