Conflicts

Invited on the set of French news channel LCI, Henri Guaino, former special advisor to Nicolas Sarkozy, was led to react to the change of doctrine announced by Putin in his nuclear threat.

For Henri Guaino, it's a question of taking the escalation announced by Putin very seriously:

"We must always take this kind of threat seriously. Remember what Kennedy said after the Cuban missile crisis. We must absolutely avoid putting nuclear states in tension with each other. So we must always take this seriously. Personally, I don't take the threat seriously."

And he continues:

"We are in the register of deterrence, in a crisis where each is trying to dissuade the other from going further. What is to be feared is not that deliberately, coldly, Putin decides to move to nuclear weapons. What is to be feared is the accident. What is to be feared is the spiral. What is to be feared is what we didn't want to do and we end up doing. So we must take seriously not the threat, but the risk."

And he added:

"If we look at the West's attitude, whether we agree with them or not, we see that yes, they are taking this seriously since for the moment, contrary to what we thought, Joe Biden has not crossed the threshold of authorizing long-range strikes on Russian territory with Western or American weapons."

(MH with AmBar/Source: LCI/Photo: DPA Anadolu/Russian Defense Ministry)