Has the West been taking Putin’s nuclear bluster too critically?
Why did the Ukrainian government not tell the Americans of their astonishing plan to invade Russian territory? Because they knew Washington would have told them not to do it.
The White House would have said this crossed the reddest of President Putin‘s red lines – with the implicit threat that he might ‘go nuclear’.
Two months ago, Putin warned: ‘We have a nuclear doctrine, look what it says. If someone’s actions threaten our sovereignty and territorial integrity, we consider it possible to use all means at our disposal.’
Now look at what actually happened after Kyiv seized a chunk of the Kursk region, sending more than a hundred thousand Russians into flight or evacuation, and killing or capturing stupefied Russian soldiers with the use of Western tanks and armaments.
Putin, in a televised meeting with his security council, played the whole thing down, referring to this startling capture of Russian territory as ‘the situation’, or ‘a provocation’, determinedly refusing to describe it as an ‘invasion’.
Putin, in a televised meeting with his security council, played down the invasion by Ukraine, referring to this startling capture of Russian territory as ‘the situation’, or ‘a provocation’, determinedly refusing to describe it as an ‘invasion’
On Saturday, Russian rescue and volunteers helped evacuate civilians from border settlements of the Kursk region
This is a repeat of what has occurred time and again since Putin launched his full-scale war on Ukraine in February 2022: he has issued unimaginable threats to the West, should they cross certain lines – but has never followed through. At the outset he warned in a broadcast: ‘Whoever tries to interfere with us should know that Russia’s response will be immediate and will lead you to such consequences as you have never experienced in your history,’ adding that Russia ‘is today one of the most powerful nuclear states’.
But after initial hesitation, Washington launched a colossal programme of lethal aid for Kyiv. Putin didn’t retaliate.
Later, he warned ominously of ’striking new targets’ if Ukraine were supplied with the devastating high-mobility artillery rocket system (Himars).
President Biden seemed deterred by this, but eventually changed his policy and sent them. What happened? Putin said their supply to Kyiv ‘doesn’t change anything in essence’.
Nor was there any comeback against this country after the UK licensed Kyiv to use our Storm Shadow missiles to strike the headquarters of the Russian Black Sea fleet in Sevastopol.
I wrote across this period that Putin’s nuclear threats were being given excessive weight, especially in Germany, which, out of fear of ‘escalation’, refuses to supply Kyiv with its Taurus missiles.
Footage released by the Ukrainian armed forces on Sunday shows the destruction of a key bridge in Russia’s Kursk region
When Sergei Naryshkin, the head of the SVR (the Foreign Intelligence Service), met his opposite number, CIA chief William Burns, in 2022, he ‘swore he understood and that Putin did not intend to use a nuclear weapon’
It’s not just that the CIA chief, William Burns, travelled to Moscow in November 2022 to tell his opposite number what the US would do if Russia used nuclear weapons: according to Burns, Sergei Naryshkin, the head of the SVR (the Foreign Intelligence Service), ‘swore he understood and that Putin did not intend to use a nuclear weapon’.
A month earlier, after Putin started making more explicit nuclear threats, he was slapped down by no less than the Chinese President, his essential ally. Xi Jinping pronounced that all involved must ‘jointly oppose the use of, or threat to use, nuclear weapons’.
In any case, the country that has most to fear from Putin’s nuclear threats is Ukraine. It has now shown what it thinks of that.
My wife’s allergy to bee stings has taught me you can NEVER take risks
There can be no greater tragedy than the loss of a child – especially when that death was avoidable. Such as 13-year-old Hannah Jacobs, who died of an allergic reaction in February 2023 after sipping a hot chocolate from a Costa in East London.
The coroner at the inquest concluded there had been ‘a failure of communication’ between one of the coffee shop’s staff and Hannah’s mother, Abimbola Duyile. The staff member clearly did not understand, when told that because of Hannah’s acute dairy allergy, her hot chocolate should be made from soya milk.
The mother told the inquest how Hannah, after taking a sip of the hot chocolate, made with dairy milk, ‘abruptly got up and went to the toilet and shouted ‘That was not soya milk’. Within hours, Hannah died from the effects of anaphylaxis.
So, all Costa’s fault? A closer reading of the coroner’s verdict shows it is not so simple. Dr Shirley Radcliffe also noted that ‘neither Hannah nor her mother were carrying an EpiPen that had been prescribed’.
I know from experience how vital it is for those liable to anaphylaxis to obey the stern instructions they would have had from their doctor to carry an EpiPen (which injects the dose of adrenaline needed to reverse the life-threatening symptoms).
My wife does not have food allergies: it is stings from wasps or bees which cause a potentially fatal reaction. Once, we were in the garden when she was stung. Within moments her lips swelled grotesquely and her breathing became constricted.
Hannah Jacobs – whose photo is being held by her mother, Abimbola Duyile – died of an allergic reaction in February 2023 after sipping a hot chocolate from a Costa in East London. Dr Shirley Radcliffe noted that ‘neither Hannah nor her mother were carrying an EpiPen that had been prescribed’
We rushed indoors and she grabbed her EpiPen, plunging it into her thigh (through her trousers). As suddenly as they’d begun, the terrifying symptoms abated.Acute food allergies are a much more life-affecting condition than my wife’s. They were compellingly described on the BBC Today programme last week by Nadim Ednan-Laperouse — ‘the smallest amount of an allergen could kill you within an hour’ – whose daughter Natasha had died at the age of 15, on a BA flight they took together, after she ate an artichoke, olive and tapenade baguette bought at Pret at the airport.
Unknown to them, it contained sesame seeds – one of the many foods to which Natasha was highly allergic.
Mr Ednan-Laperouse and his wife Tania have set up the Natasha Allergy Research Foundation, and done wonderful work to bring this issue to wider attention.
But I thought at the time of the inquest into their daughter’s death how surprising it was – given that she had suffered from a range of acute allergic reactions since she was a baby – that they did not prepare her food for the flight at home, rather than grabbing it from an airport branch of Pret.
It must be intensely difficult for the parents of teenagers, in particular, when so much of social life takes place over food and drink in public places, to insist their children with acute allergies act as though every public eaterie is a potential death trap. But it is.
As my (now retired) doctor told me at the time of the tragic death of Natasha: ‘If you have a complex range of life-threatening allergies, it’s crazy to eat out at all. You have to give yourself the best chance.’
It’s a question of where corporate responsibility ends and personal responsibility begins. But those poor children: how brave they had to be, all their short lives.
