Russian President Vladimir Putin is carrying out nuclear “blackmail” to prevent the world from helping Ukraine, “extremely dangerous” actions, condemned on Tuesday, March 8, the head of ICAN, who received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2017.
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“I think this is one of the scariest times in terms of nuclear weapons,” Beatrice Fin, who leads the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), told AFP. For this 40-year-old Swede, the nuclear threat level has never been so high, and she admits that “it’s incredibly disturbing and hard.”
Just days after sending his troops against Ukraine on February 24, the Russian president put all components of the deterrence force on alert. U.S. intelligence chief Avril Haynes told Congress on Tuesday it was an “extremely unusual” decision, noting that it hasn’t been done “since the 1960s.” “It’s extremely dangerous,” Beatrice Fin said. “This is not only meant to spread fear around the world, but also to scare people enough to not help Ukraine.”
Terror
For Beatrice Fin, Vladimir Putin has changed the deterrence paradigm. Where the nuclear arsenal is supposed to prevent conflict, Moscow, on the contrary, uses it to promote it. “Russia is almost using it for blackmail to be able to invade Ukraine and no one can intervene,” Beatrice Fin analyzes and adds: “The nuclear threat is now being used in an extremely malicious and bad way to illegally invade another non-nuclear-weapons country.
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But so far, she believes that the Russian president is unlikely to resort to absolute weapons. But “it’s not out of the question” and “we’re beginning to fear it will happen,” she admits. “Misunderstandings can escalate very quickly” and we can “accidentally resort to the use of nuclear power.”
“Scream of Alarm”
But the trouble may come to something if this crisis serves as a “cry of alarm” and pushes the nuclear powers towards disarmament. “If we survive this, we won’t always be so lucky,” said the head of Icahn. “We cannot allow countries to do this to other countries just because they have nuclear weapons,” she said. ICAN received the Nobel Peace Prize for its tireless work on the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which was ratified by 59 countries, but none of the nuclear powers. Beatrice Fin says interest in the treaty has grown since the crisis, and she notes that even the countries with the most advanced weapons have criticized President Putin. “I think there is a gap and we can really start working on disarmament,” she said, adding that after the conflict is over, Moscow cannot be allowed to keep its arsenal.
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“They will need to do something to be able to return to the international community, and that something must be nuclear disarmament,” the official hopes. In the meantime, she says she gets a lot of messages from concerned people and how to talk to her kids about the situation. “Everyone is terrified,” according to Beatrice Fin, who admits the situation is weighing on her: “I’ve spent the last ten years talking about what happens when nuclear weapons are used, what happens to bodies, what happens in cities.” and “It’s very hard for me to talk about it now.”