When on 7 April Donald Trump delivered his now infamous tweet (and I know, by now it's a tall order classifying which one is more infamous than others) on an entire civilisation dying that night, some took it as incoherent ramblings of a feeble mind, and others as 'art of the deal'. There were some sardonic responses, not least from Larry the Cat enquiring on Twitter if Trump had specified which civilisation he was talking about.

By now, most people had got used to treating everything Donald Trump says with a pinch of salt – he tends to attack, threaten, and when the threat does not reach the target – retreat. The few times he has meted out any violence, it was after posting reconciliatory messages. If anything, those are more dangerous.

Which is why it was a bit odd that Tucker Carlson proceeded to conclude that Trump's missive might indicate imminent deployment of nuclear weapons and urged the US military not to comply with such orders. Panic ensued.

On its own, this looks simply like an odd episode. However, what people not living in several information bubbles at the same time might not know or remember is that almost exactly the same episode of panic happened in May 2023, when another blogger similarly became the source of panic after spreading information on the imminent nuclear attack Russia was planning that night against Ukraine. It was almost identical, including the pleas to the Russian military not to comply with criminal orders.

In the case of 2023, the panic was spread by a Russian blogger in exile, Vladimir Osechkin, the founder of Gulagu.net, a human rights organisation documenting abuses in Russia's penal system. He became known to a wider audience after publishing leaked videos of inhuman torture of inmates in Russian penal colonies. One of his sources was a supposed whistleblower from the FSB, 'The Wind of Change', who fed him long missives on the mental deterioration in the midst of the Russian intelligence cohort — with serious arguments made both for and against this being an FSB disinformation operation in its own right. It was therefore unsurprising that Osechkin made for an ideal conduit for a textbook Russian disinformation operation. He was led to believe that Russia was planning to hit Ukraine with nuclear weapons that night, in response to Ukraine targeting the Russian flag atop the Kremlin the day before with a drone.

Osechkin livestreamed his panic and pleaded with the Russian military in charge of the nuclear arsenal not to follow what would be criminal orders. No nuclear bombing followed, and Osechkin ended up being the butt of jokes within the Russian opposition segment for several months.

Whether or not Carlson created essentially the same effect in the US knowingly or not, the parallels are striking. Carlson's interview with Putin (or to be more precise – Putin's historical lecture given to Carlson on the origins of Russian tradition), as well as later interviews with Dugin, the ideologist most closely associated with the intellectual underpinnings of Russia's imperial project, and foreign minister Lavrov, as well as his documented admiration of Russian supermarkets, all indicate that he can at the very least in theory be seen as a conduit of messages produced by Russian information ops. The man has been defending Russia's right to attack Ukraine for years. And for all we know, he might actually believe it. Or perhaps such views are a matter of choice. In any event, his intellectual abilities are difficult to ascertain.

As we can see, both men caused panic about a nuclear power purportedly getting ready to use nuclear weapons on a non-nuclear country. In both cases the claims were ludicrous and baseless. Citing Trump's words as cause for concern by now is childish – the man has issued every single type of tweet known to mankind, all contradicting each other. There is simply no scenario in which the US would use nuclear weapons on a country for not submitting to the will of Don. And while it is more difficult to claim the same in the Russian case, we are very far from a scenario in which it would make any sense even to a mass murderer like Putin.

Or it might just be a coincidence. Right? Right!?

Oh, and why?