Putin's nuclear threat is a 'psychological weapon,' Sakharov Prize laureate says in Barcelona

The representative of Ukraine's Yellow Ribbon Civil Resistance Movement, one of the winners of the 2022 European Parliament Sakharov Prize, Yaroslav Bozhko, believes Russian President Vladimir Putin's nuclear threat is mostly a "psychological weapon," he told journalists, including Catalan News, on Thursday morning in Barcelona.

His goal is to weaken Ukraine and the international community mentally, Bozhko argued the day before the first anniversary of the country's invasion. He believes the war will end in "weeks or months," and it will all start with military action from southern or eastern Ukraine.

For him, this military action is key to winning the conflict, as currently, Putin is looking at "how to extend the war, not to win it, but rather to find a negotiation with a country."

But the "only way to fight for someone's ideas is by defending them and then thinking about it," The Yellow Ribbon Civil Resistance Movement spokesperson said to journalists.

Pacifism "cannot be the solution in international politics," he said. In fact, according to him, it is a "big European problem that makes it difficult for politicians to establish military protection" to ensure citizens are safe.

"Once you start to protest any military, as a result, you have no military defense at all, and a war becomes more possible," Bozhko said.

Russian instrumentalization in Catalonia

Yaroslav Bozhko also talked about the "instrumentalization" of the Catalan independence push from Russia. 

Russia tried to use a lot of bots "to make this political conflict more sensitive for the Catalan and Spanish societies." They even tried to put Catalan society in a situation "close to violence on the streets."

To do so, Russians, as the laureate claims, used different Twitter accounts to support both sides simultaneously.