This is a scan of a short article in the Metro newspaper (their copyright but fair use) and this is a link to a more complete version of the article on their website. It is not behind a paywall at the time of writing, but it's obviously not "fair use" to copy anything but the short extract above. That is sufficient, if readers are not disposed to go and read the whole thing, because it contains all that Medawar needed (on top of other sayings and events since 2014) to come up with the following understanding of why these apparent lunatics are saying what they are saying.
They fear "US and Chinese hegemony" because AI is the superpower which Russia will never possess, having missed that particular bus whilst annexing Crimea, bridging the Kerch Straits at great and probably understated expense and driving tanks into Ukraine. They correctly fear that Russia will not be seen as a superpower once AI is seen as more significant, and a more powerful agent of warfare, than nuclear weapons. The obvious solution (in their eyes at least) is to use the nuclear weapons to "win back the world's respect for Russia" (in other words impose a global reign of terror) and in the process, perhaps, destroy the huge data centres currently hosting AIs, making a nuclear arsenal once more the only credential a superpower needs. (It amounts to using nuclear weapons as a way to time-travel back to the lost golden age of Soviet dominance, an excursion likely to deposit any survivors in the stone age.) Some may claim that the "EMP" from nuclear weapons detonated at a great height would destroy data centres as if by magic, with relatively few people killed or cities burned, but the data centres are already adequately hardened against that sort of attack, this being an effect that has been known about for seventy or more years. The protective structures would have to be destroyed, along with their contents. Modern semi-conductors are not only smaller than those of the 1970s: they are somewhat less vulnerable to electromagnetic and electrostatic trauma even when they are not in well-screened protective buildings. What nuclear EMP almost certainly would do, is disable or even ruin any digital devices, including contactless bank or ID cards, on the persons of citizens going about their normal business. Tony Blair please note!
One alternative, which is supposed to prevent US and Chinese hegemony by some sort of magic that will also cause the EU to crumble to dust before Russia's thriving economy, is to retain the world's respect for Russia by using nuclear weapons, right now, to win the war in Ukraine. This is a sign that not even Putin's most fanatical backers now can see Russia being able to win the war in Ukraine without the use of nuclear weapons, and the plural is not a misprint: they would need to make many nuclear strikes to eliminate a Ukrainian war machine that is underground and well-dispersed over a wider landscape than that of the Japanese home islands. Talk of occupying Ukrainian cities afterwards is probably designed to make Putin himself believe that this might be accomplished without the destruction of the cultural heritage which Ukraine and Russia share. It's impossible to see that working: Ukraine and all its heritage would be destroyed, not conquered. Putin would have to be removed from actual power for this to even be attempted. Is that what they plan, one wonders?
The "bad" scenario, bizarrely seen as inherent in any non-use of nuclear weapons, is Russia being "colonised" by 2050. It's not clear what "colonised" means in that context and the intent is probably to make the non-use of nuclear weapons seem unacceptable by playing on the nameless fears of the Russian people. So they can't really spell it out, in case people think it through and either decide it's something they could live with, or that it is something they could prevent by other means: especially if the rest of the world was in a mood to be helpful. A world held at nuclear gunpoint by Russia simply isn't going to rush to Russia's aid.
And all of this was presented at an economic forum, in St Petersburg, designed to showcase Russia to the world as an ideal partner to trade with and invest in. And the fact that two of the "brains" allegedly behind the entirety of the Putin project are quite unable to perceive any drawback in doing this, is the most telling thing of all, because it explains why Russia has never prospered in the way its leaders think it is entitled to, and why it never will unless and until there is a change, not in the personnel at the top, but in the type of people who rise to the top. None of Russia's revolutions and coups has ever really changed the type of person who rules Russia. And they do only rule: nobody actually governs in a kleptocracy, as America will soon discover. China already has.
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