DIDN’T SEE THAT COMING

Chechen Leader Backs Call to ‘Bomb Siberia’ to Own the West

Ramzan Kadyrov says Margarita Simonyan, the Kremlin propagandist who floated the bizarre idea, is “not so stupid.”

A Russian propagandist’s bizarre proposal to detonate a thermonuclear bomb “somewhere over Siberia” to supposedly own the West has taken a bizarre turn as Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov jumps into the fray.

While RT editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan was roundly mocked and condemned for her Monday remarks, Ramzan Kadyrov came to her defense Wednesday—and suggested her idea might not be so bad after all.

“Margarita Simonyan is not so stupid as to propose a nuclear strike on her own territory,” Kadyrov wrote on Telegram, praising the Kremlin mouthpiece as a “true patriot.” He went on to claim that her comments had been taken out of context, and that what she really meant was that “even with such an unfavorable development of events [as a thermonuclear blast], Russia, compared to the rest of the world, will not lose strategically.”

Simonyan, in her show Monday, claimed that a thermonuclear blast carried out over Siberia might be necessary to send a strong signal to the West. “You are waging a war against us, and we are forced to wage a war against you, with all that it entails,” she said, addressing Western leaders. “They won’t back out until they are in a lot of pain. They won’t stop until they understand this imminent threat.

The blast would not cause “anything scary” on the land below, she claimed. “There will be no nuclear winter, and no one will die from cancer, but all radio electronics and all satellites will be disabled,” she said, noting that “we will return to something like 1993.”

The Kremlin was quick to stress to reporters that Simonyan’s comments didn’t reflect Moscow’s official views, and the overzealous propagandist was harshly criticized by local Siberian leaders.

“You need to apologize to the residents of Siberia at the very least,” Maria Prusakova, a lawmaker from the Altai republic, said in a video on Telegram.

Novosibirsk Mayor Anatoly Lokot, in comments to local reporters, said he knows a thing or two about thermonuclear explosions, since he’s a physicist by training. “There’s nothing good about thermonuclear explosions,” he said, warning that the fallout of such a blast could last for “thousands of years.”

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