Emails released by a whistleblower from Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB) reveal that Russian officials discussed the potential use of nuclear weapons in the war with Ukraine. The email is dated March 17, March 21 and April 12. The FSB agent, dubbed "Wind of Change," sent them to Vladimir Osechkin, a Russian human rights activist who runs the anti-corruption site Gulagu.net.

The whistleblower first contacted Osechkin on March 4, and in his most recent letters from November, he reveals that there is a war going on between Putin's allies. Igor Sushko, executive director of the Wind of Change Research Group, a Washington-based non-profit organization, translated the correspondence from Russian into English, writes Newsweek.

The letters were published months before Putin threatened that Russia was ready to use nuclear weapons to defend its "territorial integrity". US President Joe Biden said on October 6 that the risk of nuclear "armageddon" is at its highest level since the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.

In a March 17 email, written just weeks after the start of the war, the source said the FSB hoped that while the conflict with Ukraine was "beyond logic and common sense" it would still "not be done outright stupidity" -- referring to use of nuclear weapons. "Wind of Change" expressed doubts that Putin will actually do so, as Russia "will also be under attack".

"A massive nuclear attack: even if we assume that it is technically possible, that all links in the chain follow all orders, which I no longer believe, it still does not make sense. Such a blow would hit everyone," they wrote.

In an email several days later, an FSB source said the use of tactical nuclear weapons against Ukraine would mean "Russia's defeat" in the eyes of adversaries and neutral countries.

"It would demonstrate a military weakness that even military success cannot overcome," Wind of Change wrote, adding that Putin could threaten to use nuclear weapons to "potentially intimidate the West."

A nuclear strike by Putin in the war with Ukraine "will achieve nothing" and could "cause such consequences that there is no sense to consider", writes the email of the "Wind of Change" of April 12. The whistleblower also suggested that the chain of command in the Kremlin would block Putin if he ever tried to order a nuclear strike.

"That is, if it is "technically possible", for which there is no certainty. Specifically, to begin with, it would require the consent of all involved (in carrying out a nuclear attack), which seems complicated," the FSB internal correspondence explains. Russia would also have to conduct the attack in a way that "doesn't equally get a missile that hits the launch point," and consider intervention by other nations into Russian territory, the email said.

And the missiles will still have to reach their targets because the interception of such missiles over our territory could be an unpleasant "side effect" that would overwhelm everything," they added.

In the same email, the FSB agent criticized the Kremlin's lack of strategy in the war, pointing the finger at Putin for Russia's military failures in Ukraine at the time. "The crux of Russia's problem has now been created by Putin himself - by the fact that he puts his political demands above all expediency: military, social, economic," they wrote.

Max Bergman, director of the European program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), previously told Newsweek that he believes Putin is now "desperate for some way to change this conflict."

"There's a lot of frustration that you have these huge stockpiles of nuclear weapons that are now kind of irrelevant — you can't really use them, and all you can do is threaten to use them," Bergman said.

The analyst added that he believes it is more likely that Putin will resort to using nuclear weapons or threaten to do so if his partial mobilization of Russian reserves proves ineffective in the war. Civil.