Ukraine War, October 1, 2022: Use of a nuclear weapon now more likely; Ukranian advances in the Donbas

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To see a list of previous articles, enter “Ukraine” in the Search Box on the upper right, on The Trenchant Observer web site, and you will see a list in chronological order.

Dispatches

1) Liz Sly, “Russia’s annexation puts world ‘two or three steps away’ from nuclear war, Washington Post, October 1, 2022
(3:00 a.m.,updated at 2:36 p.m. EDT|;

2) Lawrence Freedman, “Putin’s Annexation and Lyman’s Encirclement,” Comment is Freed, Substack, October 1, 2022;
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/09/30/putin-speech-russia-ukraine-war/

3) Robyn Dixon (Moscow bureau chief), “As war fails, Russia’s authoritarian grandmaster backs himself into a corner,” Washington Post, September 30, 2022 (1:48 p.m. EDT);

4) Lewis Page, “Why Putin would be a fool to go nuclear in Ukraine; It would be a personally risky option for the Russian dictator,” The Telegraph, October 2, 2022 (6:00 a:);

Analysis

It may be time to buy iodine tablets.

Lewis Page on the other hand lays out in devastating detail the possible conventional responses to Russian use of a nuclear weapon.

He concludes that it is far from clear the Russian chain of command would execute such an order from Putin. If they received such an order and didn’t execute it, they would have to kill Putin before he killed them.

The Trenchant Observer

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