Welcome. My name is Glenn Dyson and I'm joined today by the excellent Alexander McCurs from the Duran and Professor Sergei Karaganov, who is an honorary chairman of the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy and also a former advisor of President Yeltsin and President Putin. So welcome. It's a great privilege.

It's a pleasure to see you again.

Likewise. So our topic today is an interesting article written by Professor Karaganov,

with the title Age of War, in which, well, you outline how the world is changing

in the conflicts or wars that awaits us. Now, I wanted to

start off with an argument on an article that you previously made, which has been considered

controversial, because you argued in favor of lowering the thresholds for Russia's use of

nuclear weapons. So I remember when we were in Sochi in October, Putin addressed you directly concerning this argument.

And, well, he didn't support changing Russia's nuclear posture.

However, I found your argument to be very interesting because the premise is based on a real problem,

which appears to be that nuclear deterrence no longer seems to function to the same extent it did in the past.

I mean, during the Cold War, it would have been unthinkable that either side would have used their own weapons

to strike deep inside the territorial, well, Russia or then, or the United States, even through a proxy.

Now we see people like Anthony Blinken arguing it's not up to the US to tell Kiev where they should strike with US weapons.

And also, I guess, many were shook by seeing the use of American cluster ammunition being used against civilian targets in Belgorod.

So it just seems like one red line is breached after another.

And to paraphrase what Joe Biden, he said, or to quote, he said that sending F-16s would start

World War III. And yes, now he supports sending them. So it's, so the red lines doesn't seem to be,

don't seem to be respected anymore. So I certainly agree with the argument that nuclear deterrents has been weakened,

which is extremely dangerous.

But, you know, what is the solution?

Does it solve it to reduce the threshold of using them?

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