Russia must be ready, “in the event of absolute necessity, to use nuclear weapons effectively and victoriously”, the Russian academic Sergey Karaganov has written, arguing that a nuclear war confined to Europe could be won.
The article appeared on RT on October 6, in a translation of a piece first published in the Russian magazine Expert.
Karaganov tied the argument to President Vladimir Putin’s remarks at the Valdai forum on October 1. The club’s annual plenary session was held in Moscow this year rather than in Sochi.
Putin recalled the saying that a gun hanging on the wall will eventually go off, and said that path had to be avoided.
He also said that, in a direct attack by NATO countries, “the enemy will be twice as numerous and have far greater economic potential”, and that Russia would have to use its “competitive advantages”.
Karaganov said this was a cue to restore deterrence.
“Many, particularly Western European politicians, want war; they are actively whipping up military hysteria in their own countries. For the time being, they are acting through the Ukrainians, but they have also begun actively stirring up their own populations”, he said.
Western European elites, he wrote, “must be punished for their aggressive policies”, Ukraine “crushed and demilitarised”, and “an EU that has lost its mind must begin to truly fear”.
That, he said, cannot be done without “the active use of nuclear deterrence”.
He said he hoped it never came to use, but that Russia must be prepared.
Seeking peace by non-nuclear means alone “could prove far too costly”, and it would be “a shame to sacrifice the health and lives of our men simply to quell the aggression of those same Western Europeans”.
World opinion “makes absolutely no difference”, he said.
Use would be “a grave sin” and would lift the taboo on nuclear weapons in other regional wars, which is why he still called it a last resort. He did not think Europe would “come to its senses” without “coming face to face with the threat of nuclear annihilation”.
Use of nuclear weapons against Europe would work, according to Karaganov, “because the US will never risk its own territory for the sake of the Europeans”.
If France or Britain “continue to stick their necks out, a pre-emptive, devastating strike could be launched against them”.
If Ukraine, Germany or any other non-nuclear European country acquired nuclear weapons, “we would be obliged to launch a pre-emptive strike… It would be a short war, as a result of which these countries would cease to exist.” God forbid, he added.
He said the reasons for “the aggressive anti-Russian sentiment in the EU” were twofold.
“First, Western European elites have deteriorated significantly during the period of relative peace in the second half of the 20th century, although we hope that not all of them are complete madmen.
“And secondly, they are trying to stir up military hysteria in order to distract their peoples from widespread failures and thereby retain power.”
Karaganov wanted the arsenal aimed at Europe modernised, dialogue with Washington kept open to avoid a global exchange, and “much of Europe” placed behind a “security cordon”, with a system built in “Greater Eurasia” that excludes “the Western subcontinent”.
Individual European countries could still be dealt with, he said, if they “shake off the rule of the current madmen in Brussels and Berlin”.
Karaganov helped found the Council on Foreign and Defence Policy in 1992 and chaired its presidium from 1994 until December 2012, when he became honorary chairman. He is academic supervisor of the faculty of world economy and international affairs at Moscow’s Higher School of Economics, where he was the founding dean.
He was a close associate of Yevgeny Primakov and has served as an adviser to both Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin.
He is regarded as close to Putin and to Sergey Lavrov. He is not a government spokesman.
Putin distanced himself from Karaganov’s position at the St Petersburg economic forum in June 2023, saying there was no need to use nuclear weapons and that such talk lowered the threshold for their use. Several Russian foreign-policy specialists published rebuttals at the time.
The European Union barred him from entry after his 2023 call for a pre-emptive nuclear strike on Europe, published in the magazine Profile on June 13 that year, in which he described nuclear weapons as “God’s weapon” and argued that the threshold for their use had been set “unacceptably high”. The bloc added him to its sanctions list that same month and to its travel ban in September, citing his support for the war in Ukraine.
He returned to the argument in an interview with the US presenter Tucker Carlson on January 15, naming Germany and Britain as the countries he would strike first.
Karaganov has been described by Western outlets as “Professor Doomsday”.
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