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Future Heading: Remembering the Russian nuclear attack
It is getting close to the anniversary of, what we know now, as a Tactical nuclear strike. The strike that culminated in the no-fly zone and deployment of a 5 nation peacekeeping force as well as Ukraine’s accession to both the EU and NATO.
If you can recall in the lead up to that dreadful day, which by the gods didn’t escalate into a strategic nuclear exchange- it occurred after the loss of Lyman and Bakhmut in Donbass and the Ukrainian army being within 20km of Kherson. This allowed them to use HIMARS to bomb forward airfields and had Russians fleeing on foot over the last bridge, which was too damaged for vehicles.
The decision to use a low yield Tactical nuclear weapon, which Bellingcat has traced to a Howitzer deployed for the task, was extraordinary. It seems that a cruise missile or air strike would have been traced too easily, and indeed it took months of investigations to finally ascertain with certainty Russia’s culpability.
The attack on the nuclear reactor at Zaporizhia with an estimated 2 Kiloton nuclear weapon, fired as an artillery shell, gave the Kremlin instant deniability with a quick claim, since discredited, that Ukrainian terrorists had blown up their own reactor. Fortunately, the radiation released was not severe, though it rendered the plant unserviceable and led to electrical…
