‘We can’t have a bad outcome,’ JP Morgan Chase CEO says on Ukraine, Russia’s nuclear threats

“We can’t have a bad outcome” in Ukraine, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon said at an Institute for International Finance (IIF) event on Oct. 24 when discussing Russia’s full-scale war and its nuclear threats.

“Nuclear proliferation is the biggest risk mankind faces,” said Dimon, head of the largest U.S. bank and the world’s largest investment bank by revenue. According to him, the West has to have clarity and subordinate many things “to make sure that this ends up right.”

Dimon has described himself as a supporter of Ukraine, and JPMorgan Chase has been involved in Ukraine’s recovery efforts. Along with another U.S. investment firm, BlackRock, the company agreed to set up a $15 billion fund for Ukraine.

“A lot of other nations that border Russia, they’re quite worried. And some of (those who) don’t border Russia are quite worried,” he said.

“And we have never had a situation where a man is threatening nuclear blackmail, ‘if your military starts to win, we are rolling out the nuclear weapons’ type of thing.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly made nuclear threats against Ukraine and the West since the beginning of the full-scale invasion in February 2022. The threats have failed to materialize, and Moscow continues to wage its all-out war without using its nuclear arsenal.

“I think we should be very careful about what we are trying to accomplish in the next couple of years,” Dimon said, voicing a belief that nuclear proliferation is an even greater challenge to humanity than climate change.

Putin proposed a series of changes to Russia’s nuclear doctrine in late September. This coincided with the peak of discussions between Ukraine and its key partners to allow Kyiv to strike targets on Russian soil with Western-supplied long-range weapons.

The Kremlin announced that Russia could respond to conventional missile strikes with nuclear arms and indicated that Moscow would treat any attack backed by a nuclear-armed country as a coordinated assault.

In late September, Dimon described Russia and its two key allies in its all-out war, Iran and North Korea,” as an “evil axis who are working every day on how to make it worse for the Western world and for America.”

North Korea has sent nearly 12,000 troops to Russia, including 500 officers and three generals, Ukraine’s military intelligence (HUR) said. The first soldiers to participate alongside Russian forces in the war against Ukraine have been reportedly deployed to the front line in embattled Kursk Oblast.

In return, Russia is helping Pyongyang evade sanctions and develop its nuclear capabilities, according to HUR chief Kyrylo Budanov.