Cornered: could Putin go nuclear?

At the start of the war in Ukraine, I was given a recording made by the Ukrainian intelligence services. It was described as an intercepted call from an officer at Russia’s nuclear missile base in Siberia to a relative in Kyiv. The line crackles and a man speaks in Russian: ‘I don’t know what I should do… His [Vladimir Putin’s] finger is hovering over the button. Maybe the commander–in-chief knows he’s got no way out.’ The Russian says his base has been given three hours to put its nuclear weapons ‘into a state of readiness’. And – a terrifying further step – he has been told of orders from President Putin to enter the co-ordinates to target Kyiv and two other Ukrainian cities. With a tremor in his voice, he says: ‘He might just do it.’

At the time, a retired Ukrainian general told me the recording had not been released for fear of causing panic.