Scott Ritter On Prigozhin's Treason And The Threat Of Nuclear War

Scott Ritter has published a long and somewhat rambling substack about the Prigozhin farce:

Wagner, I hardly Knew Ye

The main portion doesn’t add all that much to our understanding of the situation, although it’s useful for its portrayal of Russian psychology. However, I’ll quote the concluding paragraphs because in those paragraps Ritter eloquently highlights the recklessness of the Neocons running this crazy war:

… the critical point here isn’t Wagner’s treasonous behavior, but rather the fact that Russia’s enemies—in particular the British and American intelligence services—saw fit to facilitate a substantive armed insurrection designed to remove from power the government of a nuclear armed power. Imagine, for a moment, the righteous ire that would be on display in the halls of Congress and within the walls of the White House if Russian intelligence had actively conspired to have an entity like Blackwater march on Washington, DC with the goal of removing President Biden from power.

It would, some might say, constitute an act of war.

Russian nuclear doctrine allows for Russia to use nuclear weapons when faced with an existential threat to the survival of the Russian state.

If the CIA and MI-6 were involved in the recruitment of Prigozhin with an eye toward facilitating Wagner’s march of Moscow, then they would have been directly engaged in an action that constituted an existential threat to Russia.

Russia would, under its doctrine, have every right to use nuclear weapons in response.

Now, there’s a catch to this rhetoric. Did Prigozhin’s farcical escapade actually represent an actual existential threat to the survival of the Russian state? Arguably not. But, then, it’s hard to be sure how things will play out in the real world once events are set in motion. And that’s the point. We can’t be sure how the Russian side will view our actions. But it seems the Neocons don’t care.