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‘Nuclear blackmail’: Deconstructing Putin’s latest strategic gamble in Ukraine
It’s been called the nuclear blackmail card — both within Western diplomatic and defence circles and in Russia itself.
And it’s a reference to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s poker-faced threat on Wednesday to resort to weapons of mass destruction if NATO steps over the line or Ukraine reclaims more of its own occupied territory.
Insisting that “this is not a bluff,” Putin warned that he has many such weapons at his disposal.
What might not be apparent from all the screaming headlines that followed — and from Putin’s order to partially mobilize his country’s military — is that his bluff is already being called in some respects. Ukraine believes he’s playing with a hand that has grown increasingly weak.
The thinking in the Kremlin, according to a number of experts, is that Moscow’s call for four referendums in the Ukrainian provinces its troops now occupy but do not fully control — Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson — would formally draw them under Mother Russia’s nuclear security dome.
The Russian military’s nuclear doctrine says the Kremlin is justified in using all means at its disposal if the army faces a conventional defeat on its own soil.
In the eyes of military experts who’ve been following the campaign, what’s been happening on Ukrainian soil in the east is more like a rout than a defeat — with Russian troops abandoning tanks and troop carriers and hitching rides to the border.
Christian Leuprecht, a professor at the Royal Military College of Canada, said the Kremlin seems to fear that if it doesn’t “hold those farcical referenda in the next 10 days or so, there won’t be a referendum for them to hold.”
The nuclear threat may be Putin’s way of pressuring the West to lean on the Ukrainians to open negotiations, he said. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said this week he believes the Russian leader wants to end the war he began in Ukraine “as soon as possible.”
“Why would the Ukrainians negotiate with the Russians at this point?” Leuprecht asked. Read the full story here.
Hundreds in Russia arrested for protesting Putin’s reserve call-up as others rush to flee country
(Reuters)
Russian law enforcement officers detain a man during an unsanctioned rally on Wednesday in Moscow, after opposition activists called for street protests against the mobilization of reservists ordered by President Vladimir Putin. Read more on this story here.
In brief
Hurricane Fiona has the potential to be a severe storm for parts of Atlantic Canada. Nova Scotians are being urged to prepare for the storm’s arrival. The hurricane will track northward and into the Maritimes late Friday and Saturday as it transitions to a post-tropical storm. That post-tropical transition does not mean the storm will be weaker, but its structure will change. It will grow in scale and cover even more territory. While the “cone of uncertainty” is still quite large, it’s narrowing each day. Forecast models continue to project landfall over Cape Breton or the eastern mainland of Nova Scotia. Read more.
The new president of the Canadian Medical Association said Wednesday he fears the country’s fragile health-care system will deteriorate further without an injection of cash — and a plan to increase the number of doctors and other health-care professionals. Dr. Alika Lafontaine, an anesthesiologist in Grande Prairie, Alta., and the group’s first Indigenous president, told CBC News that Canada’s health-care system is in “dire” straits, with quality care severely limited in some parts of the country. He pointed to recent emergency room closures in Ottawa, southwestern Ontario, Quebec and other locales and eye-popping ER wait times in major cities like Toronto and Montreal as terrible precedents undermining the longstanding Canadian promise of timely access to care for all who need it. “We’ve been saying for a while that we’re concerned about collapse. And in some places, collapse has already happened,” Lafontaine said. Read more.
Following several high-profile resignations from its leadership committee, the federal Green Party is looking at curtailing some aspects of its leadership race. According to multiple Green Party sources, party officials are discussing how they can run a leadership contest now that four members of the committee have resigned. The sources, who are not authorized to speak publicly, tell CBC News the party may hold fewer formal leadership events and is considering condensing two rounds of voting into one. The party was expected to announce the leadership finalists following the first round of voting on Oct. 14 and then introduce its new leader on Nov. 19. The Green Party federal council, the party’s governing body, has made no decisions yet. The body is scheduled to meet next Wednesday. Interim leader Amita Kuttner told a news conference on Wednesday that the race is still on, and the party will publish more details soon. Read more.
CBC News: The House8:49It’s (still) not easy being Green: Accusations mar leadership race
The pace of inflation is cooling. The annual rate came in at seven per cent in August, Statistics Canada reported this week. That’s down from the four-decade high we saw in June. But that doesn’t mean prices are coming down. Even the most optimistic scenarios forecast prices will continue to climb even as inflation comes back under control. “It’s more that price increases will be slower rather than prices will be falling,” says BMO’s senior economist Benjamin Reitzes. The best-case scenario is that higher interest rates, and a cooling economy, will lower inflation to a more moderate pace. Right now, overall inflation is slowing — but it’s mostly being dragged down by a lower global price of oil. Reitzes says consumers shouldn’t expect that to happen with other goods and services. “Some prices will probably pull back, like we’ve seen gasoline prices come down,” he says. “But others are just at a new higher plateau and they’ll just be rising at a slower pace, and that’s what slower inflation is.” Read more here.
In a year already full of film and TV releases, there’s still much to come. For the fall and winter months, streamers and traditional broadcast networks are locked in an original content race — all looking to command eyeballs and bump up audience numbers in an already overstuffed industry. The Crown returns in November for its fifth season, while The Walking Dead will wrap its 12-year run with a final series starting Oct. 2. There will also be lots of new shows for media-hungry TV fans. Here, CBC News has compiled some of the buzziest — and some of the lesser known — shows coming out later this year.
Now here’s some good news to start your Thursday: When Zenaida Saldanha and her family arrived on P.E.I. from Dubai in October 2019, her neighbours welcomed them at the Charlottetown airport, then took the family back to the home they had bought. Saldanha and her husband had met their new neighbours during the house-shopping process a few months earlier. “There was a great friendship developed in that short period of time,” she said. Saldanha is one of many Islanders who will be sharing stories on social media this week about acts of kindness from neighbours, using the hashtag #PEIgoodneighbours. It’s part of an initiative called P.E.I. Neighbour Week, organized by the P.E.I. Community Navigators — a group that provides assistance to newcomers settling in rural communities on the Island. Read more on this story here.
Opinion: The James Smith Cree Nation tragedy reveals the critical need for First Nations-led policing
The tragedy in the James Smith Cree Nation has opened our eyes to the utter lack of safety provided to First Nations people on-reserve, writes Andre Bear. Read the column here.
Front Burner: The sordid saga of Hunter Biden’s laptop
You’ve probably heard about Hunter Biden’s laptop.
The laptop and the trove of data on it belonging to U.S. President Joe Biden’s youngest son first surfaced publicly just weeks before the 2020 presidential election. At the time, it was largely discredited as foreign meddling and a disinformation campaign intended to sway the presidential race.
Since then, several media outlets have verified that at least some of the data on the laptop is real. Meanwhile, the laptop has taken on a life of its own. Depending who you ask, it’s either a distraction, or the key to unlocking untold stories of political corruption and shady dealings overseas.
New York Magazine journalists Olivia Nuzzi and Andrew Rice spent six-months looking into the laptop: what’s on it, the cast of characters responsible for its public release, and the legal investigations that have followed.
Front Burner28:00The sordid saga of Hunter Biden’s laptop
Today in history: September 22
1862: During the U.S. Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln issues the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, stating that if rebel states did not end the fighting and rejoin the Union by Jan. 1, 1863, all slaves in the rebellious states would be free.
1930: Amid the economic hardship of the Great Depression, the government of R.B. Bennett brings in the Unemployment Relief Act, providing $20 million for public works.
1956: Montreal’s Sam Etcheverry and Hal Patterson set a CFL record by combining on a 109-yard pass completion against the visiting Hamilton Tiger-Cats. The mark has since been tied twice.
1988: The federal government announces a formal apology and a $300-million compensation package for the 22,000 Japanese-Canadians interned during the Second World War.