'Putin is cornered now': FT's Gideon Rachman on Russia-Ukraine war

Chief Foreign Affairs Commentator for The Financial Times Gideon Rachman believes that Russian President Vladimir Putin is cornered now. Rachman was discussing the ongoing conflict in Ukraine with Business Today's Rahul Kanwal on Monday. 

Putin on Sunday had ordered Russian nuclear forces be put on high alert. Answering a question about what message Putin is trying to send to the West by doing this, Rachman said, "It is a deterrent, it is saying to the West to back off, don't intervene or I [Putin] could unleash a nuclear war". 

Rachman said the world needs to take Putin's threats of nuclear war "fairly seriously."

"Russian military doctrine actually includes going nuclear quite quickly, including the use of tactical nuclear weapons which are not the ones that you drop on foreign cities but ones that you use on battlefields" added Rachman. 

"Putin is cornered now, I would like to believe is not so crazy and so reckless, that he would actually use nuclear weapons for the first time since Hiroshima and Nagasaki," conveyed Rachman. "It would be an incredible departure for the whole world," he further added. 

He explained that there is a danger of events going out of hand. "The Americans would have to respond now, they may go on nuclear alert, you can get into a very dangerous cycle of escalation which is reminiscent of something like the Cuban Missile Crisis," Rachman explained. 

Commenting on Russia's current campaign, Rachman said that it is fair to believe that Putin was hoping for a swift victory which hasn't happened. 

"Putin believed elements of his own propaganda that this [Ukraine's government]  was a puppet government, the Ukrainian people regarded the Russians as brothers and would welcome them Obviously, they have been hit with extremely fierce resistance". 

"The Russian plan foresaw Kyiv falling in about 3 days, we are on day 5 now but this has not happened yet, they haven't even managed to take Kharkiv which is just 30 miles from the Russian border," Rachman said. 

He added that the war not going well for Russia does not mean Putin is going to give up. "In fact, in some ways, it makes it more dangerous because he is not going to accept defeat so think I escalation is his only route now," added Rachman.

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