Professor Sergei Karaganov (right) is a close ally of Putin (Picture: east2west/Reuters)
A top political scientist close to Vladimir Putin has called for Russia to use nuclear weapons to smash ‘the will of the west’.
Professor Sergei Karaganov is close to Putin and seen as a hugely influential foreign policy expert.
He’s bizarrely claimed that using nuclear weapons will ‘save humanity’ – and could stop the west from continuing to support Ukraine in their ongoing war.
He says Putin needs to ensure ‘the will of the west to incite and support the Kyiv junta is broken’.
Karaganov added: ‘It is necessary that the west simply “back off” and not prevent Russia and the world from moving forward.’
He said nuclear strikes should be unleashed if other countries don’t stop supplying weapons to Ukraine, adding people need to be warned of ‘the need to leave their places of residence near objects that could become targets of nuclear strikes in countries that provide direct support to the Kyiv regime’.
Karaganov claimed western countries have lost the ‘fear of hell’ or ‘Armageddon’ which could result from full-scale nuclear war.
He added: ‘The enemy must know that we are ready to strike a preemptive retaliatory strike for all of his current and past aggressions in order to prevent a slide into a global thermonuclear war.
The aftermath of the most recent missile attack in Odesa, Ukraine, on Wednesday (Picture: via REUTERS)
‘The fear of nuclear escalation must be restored. Otherwise humanity is doomed.
‘But what if they don’t back down [and if the West has] completely lost your sense of self-preservation?
‘Then [Russia] will have to hit a group of targets in a number of countries in order to bring those who have lost their minds to their senses.
’This is a morally terrible choice – we use the weapons of God, dooming ourselves to severe spiritual losses.
’But if this is not done, not only Russia may perish, but, most likely, the entire human civilisation will end.
’We will have to make this choice.’
Karaganov, 70, admitted in an article for Profile magazine that the Russian invasion of Ukraine had so far failed to take control, costing thousands of lives.
He said: ‘We can fight for another year or two or three, sacrificing thousands and thousands of our best men and grinding tens and hundreds of thousands of people who fell into a tragic historical trap of the inhabitants of the territory that is now called Ukraine.
‘This military operation cannot end with a decisive victory without imposing a strategic retreat or even capitulation on the west.
’We must force the west to give up trying to turn back history, give up its attempts at global dominance and force it to take care of itself, digesting its current multi-level crisis.
‘We will have to restore the credibility of nuclear deterrence by lowering the unacceptably high threshold for the use of nuclear weapons, prudently but quickly moving up the deterrence-escalation ladder.
‘By breaking the west’s will to aggression, we will not only save ourselves, finally liberate the world from the western yoke that has lasted five centuries, but we will also save all of humanity.’
Karaganov once claimed that Russia is a ‘genetically authoritarian power’ as a result of the country’s history which has ‘informed our genetic code’.
‘The fear of nuclear escalation must be restored. Otherwise humanity is doomed.’