Russian state TV presenters considered the likelihood of nuclear war on air Tuesday, and Margarita Simonyan, journalist and head of state network RT, told the audience not to worry because “we’re all going to die some day.”
On Tuesday’s broadcast of “The Evening With Vladimir Solovyov,” host Vladimir Solovyov said that nuclear war might be necessary to prevent other countries from interfering in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
"I think World War III is more realistic, knowing us, knowing our leader,” Simonyan said, according to The Daily Mail. “The most incredible outcome, that all this will end with a nuclear strike, seems more probable to me than the other course of events.”
The other course of events being that Russia loses the war it began in Ukraine.
“This is to my horror on one hand,” Simonyan continued. “But on the other hand, it is what it is. We will go to heaven, while they will simply croak.”
“We’re all going to die some day,” she added.
Russian President Vladimir Putin and other Kremlin officials have frequently raised the specter of nuclear war in rhetoric the U.S. and U.K. have called saber-rattling.
Agence France-Presse reported that Putin in a speech on Wednesday said any countries that attempt to intervene and create "unacceptable threats for us that are strategic in nature" would be met with a "lightning-fast" response.
On his show Tuesday night, Solovyov also brought up Western artillery deliveries to Ukraine.
"What is preventing us from striking the territory of the United Kingdom, targeting those logistical centers where these arms are being loaded?" he said.
Guest Andrey Sidorov, deputy dean of world politics at Moscow State University, replied that the United States, instead of the United Kingdom, is the real target.
"If we decide to strike the U.K., we should rather decide to strike the United States,” he said. “Final decisions are being made not in London, but in Washington. If we want to hit the real center of the West, then we need to strike Washington."
Fiona Hill, former senior director for European and Russian affairs on the National Security Council, said on a Times Radio podcast Tuesday that Putin using nuclear weapons in Ukraine is possibile.
"Of course, he [Putin] would,” Hill said. “And the thing is, he's already rhetorically done it, right? He's put us in a position that we've never been before with the Soviet Union and Russia, even going back to the Cold War, when we knew that part of the military doctrine was to use military weapons and biological and chemical weapons, as well, in extreme circumstances in the context of an existential threat to the Soviet Union, which there isn't right now to Russia."
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