Why Putin Would Use Nuclear Weapons in Ukraine

Masha Gessen: “When we say that someone isn’t acting rationally, what we mean is that we do not understand the world in which the person’s actions are rational. The problem is not so much that Putin is irrational; the problem is that there is a world in which it is rational for him to move ever closer to a nuclear strike, and most Western analysts cannot comprehend the logic of that world.”

“Robert Jay Lifton, the pioneering psychiatrist and historian who has written about nuclear arms for half a century, is fond of quoting the philosopher Martin Buber’s phrase ‘imagine the real.’ That is what we fail to do when we talk about Putin and his nuclear threat: we can’t imagine the very real possibility that he will follow through.”