Nightmare Fuel Rods
Last Wednesday was the wrong night to wake up at one a.m. and habitually check Twitter. Realising that the Russian army had started shelling the largest nuclear power plant in Europe wasn’t exactly conducive to sleep. Thoughts of Chernobyl had already been at the back of my mind during the first week of the war, even before the Russians took that notorious site over, but Zaporizhzhia seemed an even better candidate for “accidentally” turning into a giant dirty bomb. Just the fact of Russia attacking either is reason to worry very, very much.
The news next morning reported that the fire in one of the buildings at Zaporizhzhia was out, and the immediate threat had receded. Nuclear experts offered reassurances about the limited potential for a continent-wide disaster. A week later, with Chernobyl again in danger, another reminds us that its spent fuel rods are decades old and have little heat left to dissipate.
Fear of a disaster at a power plant taps directly into larger fears that Putin could launch a nuclear attack on Ukraine, the West, or both. Like others who grew up in the Cold War, my memories of mutually assured destruction and the threat of nuclear winter lie just beneath the surface; it’s awful to know that they now do for my kids as well. In an important sense, World War III has already taken place: for forty-five years after the end of World War II, it was the war that was always potentially about to happen, laying waste to our imagined futures. Now it’s back.
But in another sense, it’s already here. If a world war is a global conflict, we’re in the middle of one, albeit something new: a hybrid of military, economic and information warfare. Armed conflict could yet spread beyond Ukraine, which will make the fact of it inarguable, but economic sanctions are already changing lives—or about to—around the globe. Everyone in Europe is being drawn into this war effort by shouldering the economic burden of higher energy prices, increased military expenditure, and caring for refugees. Waves of refugees are themselves a tool of war as much as a consequence of it: driving millions of Ukrainians into Western Europe helps achieve Putin’s aim of destabilising both.
Will this World War III fuse with our long-imagined World War III in a nuclear exchange? Putin is doubling down on his invasion and cracking down on dissent, and now his supporters are finding their voice. Putin seems poised to use non-conventional weapons and blame them on his enemies, as in Syria, and it still seems possible that those will include nukes.
Britain’s contribution to addressing the Ukrainian refugee crisis has been woeful so far. With two million Ukrainians having fled to Europe, an equitable intake for the UK should already be a quarter of a million, yet as of a few days ago the Home Office had issued barely 50 refugee visas; only now are the requirements being eased. The UK Home Office has been doing exactly what the past six years have primed it to do: making it as difficult as possible for migrants to enter Britain. That the migrants in question are refugees from a terrible war should, according to Brexit-voter logic, make no difference, and yet the government seems caught off-guard by the fact that it has. Given that Brexit was a victory for Putinism, it should be no surprise that a crisis caused entirely by Putin should call its entire rationale into question.
After last week’s Zaporizhzhia scare I stepped back from obsessively following every twist and turn of the war and posting whatever I found; others are better placed to analyse and comment on it all. But I’ll continue to keep track of it when I can. Here are a few more notable links from week two.
The week where decades happened.
Paratroopers act as paratroopers only when they don’t expect resistance.
Bellingcat’s Eliot Higgins on the Information War.
An FSB whistle-blower looks behind the curtain.
Severing Russia’s ties to Western technological chains will lead to its collapse.
Ukrainians’ Russian relatives don’t believe it’s a war.
I don’t feel myself anymore. I was a journalist, very proud of myself. Now I’m a refugee.