Daniela Edburg (Mexico), Atomic Picnic, 2007.
Dear friends,
Greetings from the desk of the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.
On 27 February, Russian President Vladimir Putin met the Chief of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces Valery Gerasimov and the Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu. ‘The top officials of the leading NATO [North Atlantic Treaty Organisation] countries have made aggressive statements against our country’, Putin said. Therefore, he told his top officials ‘to transfer the deterrence forces of the Russian army to a special mode of combat duty’. The last phrase, reasonably cloaked in bureaucratic language, means that Russia’s nuclear arsenal will move to high alert. Meanwhile, Russian forces appeared to have seized the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in Ukraine, the largest nuclear power plant in Europe. Early reports that the power plant was on fire were false, although it was sufficiently chilling to hear that there had been fighting at the site.
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