March 13, 2025 (EIRNS)—Veteran Russian geopolitical strategist Sergey Karaganov, the Honorary Chairman of the Presidium of the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy, was interviewed by the Moscow newspaper MK on the current state of play in the Ukraine war, according to a report in RT. Karaganov, who has repeatedly called for Putin to “escalate up the deterrence ladder” by threatening to use nuclear weapons—or possibly even use them against a European target—provided a self-serving analysis in which he argued that Moscow’s belated “escalation” by changing nuclear doctrine and threatening to use nuclear weapons is what produced the impending military victory in Ukraine.
“We have just seen that by not using nuclear deterrence in the early stages of an armed conflict we got what we got in Ukraine,” Karaganov argued. “But thanks to the intervention of the most talented members of our expert community, we activated our nuclear deterrent capabilities, changed our doctrine and began, albeit not actively enough, to move up the so-called ladder of escalation of nuclear deterrence…. We changed our nuclear doctrine and moved up a few rungs on the ladder of escalating nuclear deterrence. This convinced our adversaries of our willingness to use nuclear weapons. The continuation of the war began to threaten the Americans with consequences where they would not be able to use their economic and other advantages…. It’s a pity we didn’t launch the nuclear deterrent mechanism earlier, then we would have achieved victory sooner.”
The fact is that Putin adopted an approach contrary to Karaganov’s, by developing and deploying the hypersonic Oreshnik missile system, with its new physical principles, which broke Russia out of the Kissingerian box of either using nuclear weapons or facing strategic defeat.
Karaganov went on to urge Putin to not take up Trump’s proposal to discuss reducing nuclear weapons, falsely equating this idea with Reagan’s SDI (without ever calling it that). “We have a number of people who have been brought up in the American ideological framework and who are in favor of any disarmament, who will take Trump’s words at face value. But they are a deception. They are a honey trap. An attempt to repeat the [Ronald] Reagan trick with the dim-witted [Soviet leader] Mikhail Gorbachev.”
