The announcement that Ger-
many and the United States plan

to send a combined total of 31
Abrams M1 and Leopard 2
tanks to Ukraine has sparked a

new round of threats from Rus-
sian officials. Vyacheslav Volo-
din, the chairman of the Russian

parliament or Duma, wrote in a

statement on Telegram on Sun-
day: “Arguments that the nucle-
ar powers have not previously

used weapons of mass destruc-
tion in local conflicts are unten-
able. This is because these states

have not faced a situation in

which the security of their citi-
zens and the territorial integrity

of their countries were threat-
ened.”

Translated from the va-
garies of diplomatic language,

Volodin is saying: “You think we

won’t use nukes against a coun-
try on our border, but we will if

we have to, because we see the
war in Ukraine as matter of life
or death for the Russian people.”
This is far from the first time

Russian officials have made nu-
clear threats against the West

during the war in Ukraine. On

January 19th, Dmitry Medve-
dev, Russian president during

from 2008 to 2012 and now dep-
uty chairman of Putin’s securi-
ty council, warned that, “The

defeat of a nuclear power in a
conventional war may trigger a

nuclear war.” He added, “Nu-
clear powers have never lost

major conflicts on which their

fate depends.” More bombasti-
cally, Vladimir Solovyov, a TV

host known as “Putin’s voice”
for his close ties to the Russian
president, has said on his show,
“The nuclear war is coming,”
while a guest predicted the war
“will end with a nuclear strike”,
to which Solovyov responded,
“But we will go to heaven, and
they will simply croak.”
On Tuesday, the “Doomsday
Clock”, a measurement of how
close humanity is to nuclear or

climate destruction according
to a group of scientists which

includes 11 Nobel laureates, ad-
vanced its clock to 90 seconds

to midnight. This is the closest
to midnight the clock has ever
been since it was created in 1947
by a group of atomic scientists
who worked on the Manhattan
Project. The group, The Bulletin
of the Atomic Scientists, said its

decision to move the clock for-
ward 10 seconds in 2023 was

because of Russia’s invasion of
Ukraine and the greater risk of
nuclear escalation it created.
Despite the terrifying

rhetoric from the Kremlin, ex-
perts caution that is unlikely

that Putin will risk escalating
the war with the use of nuclear
weapons, since this will draw
the NATO alliance even further
into a war that Russia is already

losing. George Mason profes-
sor Mark N. Katz told News-
week this week, “If Putin’s forc-
es are not doing so well against

Ukraine, it is hard to see how
they can do better by escalating
the conflict.” It remains to be
seen if Putin really is bluffing,
but the leaders of Germany and
the United States, by their recent
actions, certainly seem to think
he is. For the sake of humanity,
we all pray they are right.