The ladder Karaganov says Russia must climb

Sergey Karaganov has a clean and quietly chilling claim about himself, and he makes it twice in the course of an hour with Glenn Diesen. Three years ago, when he first proposed that Russia should escalate up the nuclear ladder and use limited atomic strikes against European countries to “bring them to their senses,” he was, he says, the proud voice of a minority. Now, he says, he is the voice of an overwhelming majority — in the military, in the political class, in society. The interview is built around that claim. So is the article he published on RT six days earlier, How Russia Can Win the New World War. The piece argues that the war in Ukraine is not really about Ukraine, that the real conflict is a fourth world war already underway, and that Russia’s path to ending it runs through the bunkers where European decision-makers shelter. What follows is what he says, why he says it, and where his prescriptions stop matching what Russia has actually done.

A particular voice

Karaganov is not a neutral commentator on Russian nuclear policy. He is one of its most consistent maximalists, with a thirty-year record of arguing that force is what Russia’s neighbors understand. The frame matters before the substance.

Sergey Aleksandrovich Karaganov is honorary chairman of Russia’s Council on Foreign and Defense Policy, an analytical body he has been associated with since the early 1990s, and academic supervisor at the Faculty of World Economy and International Affairs at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow. Diesen introduces him as someone who wrote speeches for Brezhnev and advised Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and Putin. The Brezhnev-speeches detail comes from Karaganov’s own self-presentation, which Diesen has used in earlier introductions; Wikipedia and English-language profiles confirm the Yeltsin and Putin advisor roles and his close association with the late Yevgeny Primakov, the Soviet-era diplomat who became foreign minister and prime minister in the 1990s. Karaganov is, on any reading, a person with real proximity to Russian foreign-policy elites. He is not, however, a current government official; he holds no formal post inside the Kremlin or the Defense Ministry.

The reason this matters is that Karaganov has developed a public role that does not have a tidy English equivalent. He is part academic, part state-adjacent commentator, part what one of his former interlocutors called “the projection of what Europeans believe Russia to be.” His writings have, over decades, anticipated turns Russia’s foreign policy actually took. They have also repeatedly proposed turns that Russia’s leadership has declined to take. Reading him as a leading indicator of Kremlin direction is sometimes correct and sometimes badly wrong. Reading him as someone with privileged access to the conversations going on inside Russian elite circles is, by contrast, almost always correct.

The interviewer is also a particular voice. Glenn Diesen is a Norwegian professor of Russian international affairs at the University of South-Eastern Norway, whose intellectual project has been to argue that the post-Cold-War security order in Europe broke because the West refused to accommodate Russia’s interests, and that what is now happening was foreseeable and avoidable. He is unusually well-sourced inside Russian academic and policy circles, including Valdai. He is also openly committed to a reading of the war in which NATO bears the bulk of the responsibility. The conversation between the two of them is a conversation between people who already agree on most of the diagnosis. Disagreement, where it appears, is between Karaganov and the prudent Russian government he wishes were less prudent.

What Karaganov says in these conversations is therefore worth reading carefully and worth bracketing. The first three sections that follow trace what he is actually arguing. The fourth tests it against what Russia has demonstrably done. The last attends to the cultural and civilizational frame that, in his telling, makes the rest cohere.

The fourth world war thesis

Karaganov’s claim is not that the world is approaching a major war. It is that the war has already started, and that recognizing this is a precondition for ending it. The historical scaffolding is the move that does most of the work.

The argument’s first move is a periodization. Karaganov counts the wars beginning with Napoleon’s 1812 invasion of Russia, when, in his telling, twenty-five nations marched east under French leadership; the First World War; the Second World War; and now a third — or, depending on how he is counting on a given day, a fourth. The point of the count is not historical precision. It is the claim that what is happening in 2026 belongs in the same category as 1812, 1914, and 1939: a coordinated Western attempt to break Russia, in which the Ukrainian battlefield is one front among several.

The other fronts, on his telling, are already visible. The June 2025 American–Israeli strikes on Iran were not, in his account, about Iranian nuclear weapons; they were a deliberate destabilization of the southwestern Eurasian theater that has now spread, predictably, into Pakistan, into the Gulf, into the maritime corridors. Add Latin America, where Washington has been pressing on Venezuela, and Karaganov’s geographic claim is complete: this is a war whose theaters are dispersed but whose underlying conflict is structural. The post-1945 order managed by the West is unraveling. The West, in its older and most entrenched form — what he describes as the project that allowed Europeans “to plunder the rest of the world for five centuries” — is trying to claw back its position.

In the RT article, the periodization runs slightly differently. Karaganov dates the war’s roots to 1917, when Soviet Russia broke from the capitalist system; treats the second round as the Cold War; and locates the third in the Soviet collapse and the post-Cold-War expansion of NATO. The accounting differs. The point does not. What links each version is the conviction that the Russian leadership has misread the conflict as local — confined to Ukraine, manageable through partial diplomatic settlements — when it is in fact the latest round of a centuries-old contest in which Russia must decide whether it intends to win or to lose.

The Russian leadership, in his account, has been losing badly. The “special military operation” framing accepted the imposed rules of a war of attrition against a coalition with greater economic and demographic potential. That war is grinding, with mounting Russian casualties and far higher Ukrainian ones. It will, on his telling, end either with Russian escalation or with continued bleeding that ends in something worse. The argument is uncomfortable to read because it does not pretend the consequences are negligible. He proposes nuclear strikes against European cities while simultaneously praying — he is, he reminds Diesen, a believer — that they will not be necessary.

Europe is the source of all evil — of all wars, of all genocides, of all everything the worst in human history. — Sergey Karaganov, to Glenn Diesen

The line is harsh, and it is his. It is also the kind of formulation that, on his own terms, only makes sense if you already share his diagnosis. To paraphrase it down to anything less than what he said would be to do the work of softening that the editorial register of Lecturas does not exist to do. The reader is left with what Karaganov said, and with the burden of judging what to make of it.

The escalation ladder

The prescriptions are precise and they are not new. What is new is the institutional architecture Karaganov now wants Russia to build around them.

What Karaganov advocates can be sorted into four moves. They are connected, but each is independently consequential.

The first is doctrinal. He wants Russia’s nuclear doctrine rewritten to authorize first-use against a coalition of states that, taken together, possess economic, technological, and demographic preponderance over Russia. This is not a defensive doctrine; it is an explicit claim that being conventionally outmatched is itself a sufficient ground for nuclear use. It goes meaningfully further than the November 2024 update, which lowered the threshold but kept the trigger in the language of attacks on Russian sovereignty and territorial integrity.

The second is institutional. He proposes that the commander-in-chief — Putin — delegate authority for the European theater to a designated general, with an attached staff of officers experienced in nuclear and conventional operations, who would have authority, when necessary, to use nuclear weapons against specific European countries. This is a structural change. In Russian doctrine, decisions on nuclear use remain reserved to the head of state. Karaganov is proposing the institutionalization of nuclear-use authority below that level, for a specific theater. The proposal would, if adopted, carry consequences for crisis stability that go well beyond what doctrinal language alone can capture.

The third is operational. He wants Russia to escalate first with conventional strikes against logistical, symbolic, or military-base targets on European soil, then — if Europe does not “succumb” — to follow with what he calls a series of “limited” nuclear strikes. The targets he singles out are the bunkers and command centers where European political and military elites would shelter. He is explicit that the European peoples are not whom he wants to destroy. The European elites are whom he wants destroyed. The distinction, in his framing, is moral; in the framing of nuclear-weapons effects on populated continents, it is approximately none.

The fourth is technical. He wants Russia to build, test, and deploy nuclear and conventional munitions specifically designed to penetrate hardened underground bunkers, dispelling what he calls “the illusion” that European elites can shelter from a Russian strike. The RT article repeats this prescription almost verbatim, with the additional argument that the recent Russian Ministry of Defense list of European companies supporting the Kiev regime is a small but necessary first step in this direction.

He is also explicit about what he is not proposing. He does not want Russia to take an inch of European territory. He does not want a “massive” nuclear strike. He does not want what he describes as the European peoples destroyed. The framing here is consistent with his older line: the goal is not conquest but submission, and the instrument that produces submission, in his view, is fear. Diesen presses him on the political foundation of all this, and Karaganov gives the answer that has remained unchanged for three years.

The claim about a swing from minority to majority is impossible to verify from outside Russia. It is also inconsistent with how Russian governmental decisions have actually fallen. Karaganov has been advocating these prescriptions since at least 2023. Putin has, in the public record, repeatedly chosen the more cautious option each time. The November 2024 doctrine update went part of the way; it did not adopt Karaganov’s institutional or operational prescriptions, and the more striking battlefield events of the last twelve months — Operation Spiderweb in June 2025, the Armavir radar strikes of May 2024 — have not produced the responses Karaganov says are necessary. Whatever the temperature of Russian political opinion, the policy has not moved as far as he says it has.

What Putin actually adopted

The gap between Karaganov’s prescriptions and the Russian government’s actions is large, consistent, and analytically the most important thing about him.

Russia did revise its nuclear doctrine. On 19 November 2024, Putin signed the Fundamentals of State Policy of the Russian Federation in the Field of Nuclear Deterrence, replacing the 2020 version. The revision did three things publicly. It expanded the conditions for nuclear use from “the very existence of the state” being threatened to a “critical threat” to sovereignty or territorial integrity from conventional attack. It declared that an attack by a non-nuclear state with the participation of a nuclear state would be treated as a joint attack — language plainly aimed at the use of Western-supplied long-range missiles against Russian territory. And it added scenarios — isolation of part of Russian territory, attacks on environmentally dangerous targets, NATO expansion, large-scale exercises on Russia’s borders — to the list of conditions on which nuclear use might be considered.

It did not do several things Karaganov has been pushing for. It did not authorize first-use against a coalition with conventional preponderance, and it did not delegate nuclear-use authority to a theater commander. It did not name European elites or their bunkers as targets. The decisions on nuclear use remain, as before, with the head of state. Western analytical institutions — Stimson, Carnegie, the European Leadership Network — have read the document as more rhetorical than operational: an attempt to use nuclear language to deter Western support for Ukraine, not a doctrine that can be straightforwardly translated into use scenarios.

The two most striking battlefield events of the last twelve months illustrate the same gap. In late May 2024, Ukrainian drones struck the Voronezh-DM early-warning radar at Armavir and the Voronezh-M at Orsk — facilities that form part of Russia’s strategic nuclear early-warning network. The U.S. government, according to The Washington Post, expressed private concerns to Kyiv about the strategic implications. By the logic of any conventional reading of nuclear deterrence, attacking the systems that detect a first strike should be among the most dangerous things one nuclear power’s ally can do to another. Russia did not respond at the nuclear level. It responded with the same conventional operations it was already running.

Then on 1 June 2025, Ukraine’s Security Service executed Operation Spiderweb. One hundred and seventeen first-person-view drones, smuggled into Russia and launched from concealed trucks parked near remote airbases, hit five Russian airfields stretching from Murmansk to Irkutsk, damaging or destroying around forty aircraft including Tu-95, Tu-22, and Tu-160 strategic bombers — the airborne component of Russia’s nuclear triad. Independent analysts have confirmed at least twenty-two destroyed or heavily damaged airframes. Russian state media called it a “Pearl Harbor”; Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov insisted nuclear deterrence was unaffected. Whatever else is true, an attack on a nuclear-armed state’s nuclear-capable bombers, of this scale, on this geography, did not produce the doctrinal escalation Karaganov has been demanding.

The pattern is consistent. The Russian government has, on multiple occasions, declined to do what Karaganov has urged it to do. He has interpreted each declination as a delay rather than a refusal. The November 2024 doctrine update became, in his telling, evidence that his arguments had been adopted. So has the public list of European companies. So would, presumably, anything that happens next, however far short of his actual prescriptions it falls. This is one way to read the data. Another, which the Western analytical literature has been more inclined to take, is that the Kremlin has used Karaganov’s voice as a credible escalatory signal to Western capitals while keeping its own decisions well inside the constraints that have characterized Russian nuclear behavior throughout the war.

Europe, thrown away

The civilizational frame is not decoration. It is what makes the rest of Karaganov’s argument hang together for him.

The hour with Diesen ends on a long passage about Russian identity. Karaganov is, by training, a historian; he has been writing about what he calls Russia’s Eurasian-civilizational character for many years. The argument has a clean shape. Russia, he says, has never really been a European country. Its external cultural roots are not from Europe but from Palestine (via Byzantine Christianity), from the Muslim and Buddhist worlds, and from the great Mongol Empire — to which, on his telling, the structure of Russian political authority owes more than to anything Western. Peter the Great’s eighteenth-century turn toward Europe was useful because Russia needed European technology, military organization, and artillery science. By the end of the nineteenth century, Russia had absorbed what it needed; the European journey should have ended there. Continuing it produced two world wars and seventy years of communism.

He is careful to specify what stays and what goes. Pushkin, Dostoevsky, and Tchaikovsky are Russian; without Europe, he says, there would not have been the skin to grow them. He cherishes them. He also cherishes specific European friends, and he names this in the conversation with Diesen, who is Norwegian. Europe as a museum and a literature is to be kept. Europe as a civilizational influence on Russian foreign policy and political identity is to be ended. The Russian “Europhiles,” he says, are now either intellectually impotent or morally corrupt; following them, after what has happened, is — he uses the word twice — idiocy.

This frame matters because it is what licenses everything else. If Europe is the source of “all evil — of all wars, of all genocides, of all everything the worst in human history,” then escalating against European elites is not a transgression of any moral order; it is a defense of one. If Russia’s true civilizational center lies east — among China, India, the Islamic world — then turning away from Europe is not loss but homecoming. The frame disposes of a question that would otherwise be hard. Why does Karaganov keep insisting that limited nuclear strikes on European cities would not be a catastrophe? Because, in his frame, Europe is already a catastrophe: a centuries-old machine for producing wars, genocides, and exploitations, and the use of force against it is restorative.

The frame also makes the JEF argument, on which the conversation closes, intelligible in his terms. The Joint Expeditionary Force is a UK-led ten-country military coalition, formed in 2014, focused on the North Atlantic and the Baltic. In late March 2026, the British prime minister authorized UK forces to interdict and board sanctioned vessels associated with Russia’s so-called shadow fleet in UK waters. The decision came alongside parallel actions by JEF allies in the Baltic — Finland, Sweden, Estonia — and a January 2026 joint warning from fourteen European states aimed at the same fleet. Karaganov treats these actions as piracy. In his frame, piracy is what the great European maritime powers have always done; the appropriate response is not legal but kinetic.

The line is delivered, in the original interview, in the same calm register as the rest of the conversation. That register is the most disconcerting thing about the way Karaganov speaks. He is not raving. He is making, by his lights, a strategic argument, with appropriate caveats and acknowledgments of the moral weight of what he is proposing. The argument is that this is the cheaper option. The alternative — continued attrition in Ukraine, continued JEF interdictions in the Baltic, continued American maneuvering — is, in his telling, the path to a thermonuclear war he is trying to prevent. This is the structure of every escalation argument that has ever been made. It is what makes them dangerous and what makes them necessary to read carefully when the people making them are inside the policy circuit of a major nuclear power.

Coda — neither dismiss nor inflate

What is uncertain after this conversation is whether Karaganov is a leading indicator of Kremlin direction or a permanent dissenter from it. The evidence cuts both ways. His earlier doctrine — Russia as defender of ethnic Russians abroad, by force when necessary — was fringe in 1992 and operational by 2014. His more recent prescriptions for nuclear use have been, on the public record, repeatedly declined by Putin. Both can be true; the question is which kind of decline this is. A holding pattern, in which the Russian leadership keeps Karaganov’s voice available as a signal to Western capitals while reserving the actual decisions to itself, is consistent with everything we have seen. So is a slow drift in the direction he is pushing — the November 2024 doctrine update did go further than the 2020 version, even if not as far as he wanted.

What is not uncertain is the underlying material. Russia has lowered its nuclear threshold. Ukraine has hit nuclear-related Russian infrastructure twice — the Armavir and Orsk radars in May 2024, the strategic bomber fleet in June 2025 — without producing the nuclear response that, by the most aggressive readings of Russian doctrine, those acts could have triggered. The British state has authorized the boarding of vessels at sea associated with Russia, in the kind of action that, twenty years ago, would have been understood as a step toward war. Karaganov’s article has been given prominent placement on a state-aligned outlet of record. None of this means he is right about what to do. All of it means the situation he is describing — accumulating Western actions that, in any prior framing, would have produced major Russian responses — is the situation that actually exists.

What the reader is left with is, at minimum, an obligation not to read Karaganov in only one of the two available registers. The temptation to read him as the voice of the Kremlin is wrong; it is what allows people to mistake his article for Russian policy. The temptation to read him as a fringe crank shouting into a microphone is also wrong; it is what allows people to dismiss the longer record on which he has, more than once, been ahead of where Russian policy went next. The honest reading sits between those two. He is one of the people inside Russia’s foreign-policy thought-influence circuit who has consistently advocated for the most extreme available escalation. His prescriptions are not adopted in full. They are sometimes adopted in part. And the slope of “in part” is the thing the careful reader watches.