This is the Friends of History Debating Society. I'm John Batshu with Professor H.J. McInder, International Relations.

Moscow, point of view. One, Moscow is calling off the offensive. It is said. Two, Moscow is asking for new mobilization. Four hundred thousand more. It is said.

Three, Moscow is distributing some of its nuclear arsenal to Belarus, headed by the dictator Lukashenko. It is said. And four, right now, it is very unclear about Moscow's plans for the immediate future.

The harvest is going to be poor. That is a combination of not having enough people at the farms because they've been drafted. And also the difficulties of transporting the grain and the wheat and the really good wheat that people eat out of the combat zone.

That is enough, Professor. Moscow suddenly, 24 hours after the week of news in the west of the bank crisis, Moscow looks to have made major decisions. Their point of view at this moment, to your measure.

Well, I think that they have essentially decided on the one hand to avoid doing anything that is going to lose hundreds of thousands of more dead Russians. I think that this idea that they are going to mobilize another four hundred thousand people is very remote. That is not going to happen because they have no way of arming those people.

The Ukrainians are very impulsive. They will just let the people come and they will do them in. I think also that the Russians are very realistic about their financial situation and their economy is being destroyed by sanctions.

Although this destruction is not bringing us any closer to a termination of the war.

So caution on one side, not really trying a big offensive, which will fail. But on the other hand, an increasing attempt to just to scare the Western countries and the way you scare them is by talking about nuclear weapons.

Remember, of course, if the US can be said to have had a goal or in our intervention in this war, it was to prevent World War III. In other words, prevent escalation to prevent nuclear exchange. So we signaled that we are really scared by that.

Mr. Medvedev, who I remember as being a bright reformer, building the new Russia with Mr. Putin, he has given a very menacing, I guess it is an interview or maybe it is a talk in which he says that the Russians will be forced to use nuclear weapons.

If someone tries to arrest Putin and it is interesting that the country he talked about attacking with nuclear weapons was Germany, which has really has no idea yet what its strategy is.

But I am sure that the idea is that Berlin will be chosen out of the many possible targets in Western Europe for nuclear punishment if the Germans should be so unwise to try to arrest Mr. Putin.

That is going to cause the Germans to be very upset.

He also said that if Crimea would look like it was going to be conquered, then they would use nuclear weapons.

If they use nuclear weapons against Ukraine, there is no certainty at all that this will succeed in terminating the war, but Ukraine is so near to Russia that if they use nuclear weapons, they are in effect bombing themselves.

The second biggest country in Europe is substantially larger than France.

You asked yourself, would one nuclear bomb cause the French to surrender? Well, I am not sure, but I think it might not.

Of course, the French have the capacity to strike back with nuclear weapons.

The Russians have the advantage in dealing with Ukraine that we in 1993 and 1994 forced, we have this slightly strange idea, but it is a philosophy that is pervasive, called non-proliferation, which says that if you want to avoid nuclear war, be sure that only the United States has nuclear weapons.

We agree that we will go into a nuclear war to defend anybody who doesn't have them, and you can see the problems with that.

I think that I really can't envision Mr. Biden firing nuclear weapons or any number of President.

...