Opinion by Maria Zakharova

💬 The Americans keep saying that Russia could resort to using nuclear weapons in Ukraine. In doing this, they are pursuing several goals, and one of them is obvious: to intimidate their own people. Not only has Russia never threatened anyone with nuclear weapons, but, on the contrary, has been warning all parties all along against making irresponsible steps of this kind. However, this does not sit well with Washington.

❓ This left the US thinking: what can it do?

They pretended several times that it was Sergey Lavrov who threatened that Russia would use WMDs. To no avail. We immediately debunked these fake news.

When Plan A fails, there is always a Plan B, quite similar to Plan A, but with a twist.

Recently, three US titles released articles discussing the question of how, when and why the Russians will drop the bomb, in fact reporting on the Russians’ thought instead of looking at what they are saying.

It started with Politico, a respected publication, asserting that it had information at its disposal on Moscow’s plans to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine. They even pretended to know where the nuclear weapons may be deployed. Needless to say, all three nuclear scenarios are pure fiction and exist only in the reporters’ fantasies.

Then came the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, a publication that famously invented the Doomsday Clock showing the world how close we are to destroying the world. It published an article on how the United States will respond when Moscow uses nuclear weapons. In the article, former member of the US National Security Council Jeffrey Edmonds refers to Russia’s nuclear doctrine (Basic Principles of State Policy of the Russian Federation on Nuclear Deterrence), which does not stop him from waxing lyrical about the possible nuclear apocalypse.

The National Interest, another prominent title, immediately followed up on this publication with its own article. Who wrote it? Zalmay Khalilzad, the architect of the US strategy in Afghanistan. In it, the US diplomat speculates on what will happen if Moscow carries out a nuclear strike against the United States. After his successful stint in Kabul, Mr Khalilzad probably decided to go further and expanded his horizon to a planetary scale.

☝️ All this may suggest that the United States is laying the groundwork in the media space for staging yet another provocation, but this time on an apocalyptical scale.