Vladimir Putin ‘may be ready to have a war’ as he made light of fears around nuclear attacks, Nikita Khrushchev’s great-granddaughter has warned.
Nina Khrushcheva, who is currently in Russia, described a ‘palpable’ sense of anxiety in the country about what the president will do next in the Ukraine war.
The professor of international relations at New York’s The New School told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that Mr Putin’s remarks yesterday are unnerving.
At an annual foreign policy conference outside Moscow, Mr Putin was asked whether the world is on the verge of nuclear war.
Mr Putin paused for 10 seconds, in a stretch of silence described by moderator Fyodor Lukyanov as ‘alarming’.
The smirking president replied: ‘I did that on purpose so you would be on your guard. The effect has been achieved.’
Mr Lukyanov reminded Mr Putin that it was the 60th anniversary of the end of the Cuban Missile Crisis which ended only after Mr Khrushchev withdrew his nukes.
Could Mr Putin do the same? He told Mr Lukyanov: ‘No way.’
To Khrushcheva, she wasn’t surprised Mr Putin doesn’t think like her great-grandfather who ruled for more than a decade before being ousted in 1964.
‘When Khrushchev was ousted one of the allegations was he took rockets away from Cuba and after that, the Soviet Union looked weak,’ she said.
‘Khrushchev said, “What, I was supposed to start a world war?”
‘Putin clearly doesn’t think in those terms. He thinks, “it is our way and the way I decide it is going to be and we’re not going to back off”.
‘I’m not going to put words in his mouth – he didn’t say “otherwise it will be a world war” – but it does seem that he may be ready to have a war instead of adjusting his political behaviour.’.
Khrushcheva described the mood in Russia as one bristling with tension and Russians are bracing themselves for the worst.
‘Society is getting more desperate. It is frozen in despair – not even fear, despair – we don’t know what is going to happen [or] what tomorrow brings,’ she said.
‘The last month of nuclear conversation… there is a story [that sales of radiation pills] went up 70%. People are preparing for something disastrous.’
Mr Putin denied that Moscow was preparing to use nuclear weapons in the war against Ukraine.
‘We have no need to do this. There’s no sense for us, neither political nor military,’ he said.
This is despite how Mr Putin was the one himself who raised this threat, saying in a September address he is ‘not bluffing’ about his willingness to press the button.
‘Those trying to blackmail us with nuclear weapons should know the tables could be turned on them,’ he said.
Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@metro.co.uk.
For more stories like this, check our news page.
from News – Metro https://ift.tt/TsNMGhE
0 Comments