Situation at Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant in Ukraine raises concern after Wagner riot – Bloomberg

Unable to win and suddenly vulnerable at home, Putin may decide to destroy Ukraine by fire, flood, or radiation completely.

The former editor-in-chief of Handelsblatt Global, Andreas Kluth, writes about this in an article for Bloomberg.

To understand the danger of this moment, try to imagine two pictures simultaneously.

On the one hand, in Russia itself, Yevgeny Prigozhin, who heads the Wagner mercenaries, is trying to carry out a coup against the Kremlin. He says the coup was not aimed directly at his former patron, Vladimir Putin, but he still declared him a traitor and promised severe punishment.

On the other hand, in Ukraine, President Volodymyr Zelensky has just warned that the Russians appear to be hatching another act of mass terrorism, this time related to a radiation disaster. Last week, the head of Ukrainian intelligence, Kyrylo Budanov, reported that the Russians had mined the cooling system of the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, which was captured immediately after the attack on Ukraine last year and has been held ever since.

Since the summer of last year, the IAEA and the whole world have been worried about the possibility of another radiation disaster in the spirit of Chornobyl. Such a disaster can happen by accident because the Russian military is shooting from there, and the Ukrainians are shooting back. Or it can happen on purpose if the Russians are forced to retreat and decide to make the lost territory inaccessible to Ukraine by polluting it.

And it is somewhat reminiscent. Last fall, the Russians also mined the Kakhovka dam downstream from the Dnipro River. Zelensky then warned that the invaders appeared to be preparing to demolish the dam to wreak havoc in the surrounding regions. The dam really was destroyed this month. Experts agree that the explosions occurred inside the building, where only those who controlled it – the Russians – had access.

"The increasing scale of Russian atrocities suggests that Putin feels that he is either losing the war or cannot win it. Prigozhin's mutiny will add to Putin's panic. He may escalate again, perhaps in a desperate attempt to change the narrative before retreating. There is a term for this form of warfare: scorched earth tactics," the author writes.

The metaphor, however, has its limits. Today, the warring parties do not necessarily have to burn the entire country so it does not fall to the enemy. However, the Russians have certainly already done this to a large part of Ukraine with their indiscriminate bombing. Putin's troops can also flood, starve, irradiate, or otherwise infect the territory and population.

There is nothing new about scorched earth tactics. The Scythians were among the first to use it two and a half millennia ago. On the territory of Ukraine, where the front line now runs, they burned food supplies and poisoned wells, retreating under the pressure of the troops of the Persian king Darius the Great. Since then, there has hardly been a major war without such tactics.

Some historical figures were really remembered primarily for burning the earth. In the 15th century, Vlad III the Impaler, who inspired the legend of Dracula, retreated during a war with the Ottomans in the 15th century in what is now Romania. He left behind a "forest of the impaled," i.e., tens of thousands of men, women, and children impaled on stakes. During the American Civil War, Union General William Tecumseh Sherman completely destroyed everything in a wide strip from Atlanta to Savannah with his "March to the Sea."

At least when the defending party does the burning, the practice may seem justifiable from a military point of view. In 1812, the Russians could drive out the Napoleonic army by retreating, destroying everything on their own land, including Moscow, and then chasing the French soldiers on their way back.

But this is not the role that the Russian army plays today. This time, Putin is an imperialist aggressor who launched an unprovoked attack only to realize that he could not subdue the victim nation by brute force. He appears to be responding by orchestrating an even greater genocide by kidnapping and deporting Ukrainian children and rendering much of Ukraine uninhabitable, regardless of who wins the war.

And now Putin has also been challenged by Prigozhin – the "ruthless and ambitious Russian Rimbaud" who leads battle-hardened mercenaries. Prigozhin recruited many of these "soldiers of fortune" in prisons.

The author is sure that after the act of the leader of "Wagner," Putin will become even more paranoid.

"Let the whole world – and especially those who call for 'negotiations' in this 'conflict' – take note of what this modern government is capable of. From Beijing to New Delhi, Pretoria, Brasilia, and beyond, neutrality can no longer be considered a choice. Because Putin is a person who will burn the earth, even with the fire of nuclear fission," the author emphasizes.