Letter: Russia is a black comedy — however with nuclear weapons

We’re maybe about to skate nearer to the thermonuclear threshold than at any time since 1962 and the Cuban missile disaster.

If Vladimir Putin was a keystone in Russia’s mafia-constructed bridge, and if his position within the 2000s was to introduce construction and guidelines into that mafia, then final week’s assassination of Daria Dugina, daughter of the distinguished Russian ideologue and Putin supporter Alexander Dugin, reveals the cement below the keystone is eroding (Opinion, August 23).

Perhaps the west hopes that one thing liberal will come up in Putin’s place. However with out the keystone, maybe we’re additionally about to re-enter the times of Zhmurki, the crime comedy movie set within the chaotic and unstable Russia of the Nineties: besides this time, these taking part in Useless Man’s Bluff may need tactical nuclear weapons with which to gamble, moderately than a stolen Tokarev.

Khrushchev and Kennedy got here near the brink. They had been educated males. In distinction, mafia don’t assume: they only maintain going till they win or they’re useless. What occurs to these round them? Regardless of. Policymakers in Ukraine and the west should think about themselves amid a nuclear holocaust. They have to act immediately such that, if these circumstances come up within the close to future, they will say with confidence: “We should always have executed nothing otherwise, negotiated no otherwise, and we took solely acceptable dangers.”

Richard Owen
Kyiv, Ukraine