Blazingcatfur

President Joe Biden might be right that the use of tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine will lead to “Armageddon.” Since NATO is outmatched 250 to 2,000 in the category of non-strategic nuclear weapons, it may well have to choose between escalation to the strategic level of war (which would be disastrous for all concerned regardless of the outcome) or defeat if it finds itself on the wrong side of the nuclear threshold. Ironically, some of the Western commentators who most fervently oppose the use of any nuclear weapons see this rather precarious position as desirable: they want the United States to carry out massive retaliation in the case of any nuclear use against NATO forces, or at the very least threaten to do so. They believe that the best method for a country to deter a nuclear attack is to repudiate the very idea that a nuclear war could be limited, even to the point of unilaterally abandoning the capability to fight such a war. Merely possessing the capacity for limited war—so the argument goes—demonstrates to one’s adversary that there is some level of nuclear conflict that you find tolerable, and this makes nuclear war more likely. Possess only the capability for massive retaliation, and you will never have to use it. This is an alluring argument: it offers us the best possible outcome at a relatively low dollar cost. But everything has a price, and in the case of minimum deterrence, the price is extreme risk.

Russia’s Yevgeny Prigozhin, a close ally of President Vladimir Putin, said on Sunday that a former mercenary who was filmed being executed by a sledgehammer blow to the head after changing sides in the Ukraine war was a traitor.

Prigozhin, a Russian businessman who founded the Wagner private military group, was responding to an unverified video distributed on Telegram that showed a man identified as a former Wagner mercenary being executed after admitting that he had changed sides in September to “fight against the Russians”.

More… Another part of the video shows a man in Ukrainian military uniform, with his head taped to a makeshift anvil made of bricks and concrete. He says that he is “Evgeniy Nuzhin, born in 1967, went to the front to join Ukraine and fight against the Russians” and that “on 4 September, he carried out his plan to join Ukraine.”

Iran is preparing to hand the Kremlin the blueprints for its most effective weapon against the West: the underground financial network it relies on to evade sanctions.

For years, the Islamic Republic has frustrated American efforts to isolate it and starve its economy by constructing a parallel universe of front companies and foreign banks — including major financial institutions based in Europe and the U.S. — that Iranian companies use to evade international controls and conduct business abroad.