The Belarus bombshell

Putin's nuclear threat must be taken seriously

The threat of nuclear war looms with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s recent moves at the start of the second year of his invasion of Ukraine. Having declared, ahead of the first anniversary of the war, that Russia would halt its participation in New Start, the last major remaining nuclear arms control treaty with the US signed in the Obama era, and put its nuclear arsenal on high alert, Mr Putin recently announced he would deploy tactical (or battlefield) weapons in Belarus, the former Soviet republic that is Russia’s sole western ally. Mr Putin told the Russian state broadcaster over the weekend that Moscow would complete constructing a special storage facility for tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus by the beginning of July. Moscow has also transferred an Iskander short-range missile system, which can be fitted with a nuclear or conventional warhead. Russia has helped Belarus convert 10 jets to make them capable of carrying tactical warheads, and training pilots on these reconfigured aircraft would begin next month. Mr Putin likened these moves to the US stationing nuclear arms in Europe under the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). The US has nuclear weapons in Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Turkey.

Though NATO has predictably described Mr Putin’s nuclear rhetoric as “dangerous and irresponsible”, it is difficult to gauge yet whether the Russian president is indulging in a new game of brinkmanship on account of the direction of the war. His publicised spring offensive, which began last month, has been bogged down in Bakhmut, a city in eastern Ukraine, which is a defence hub of the Ukrainian armed forces and offers critical regional connectivity to the industrial heartland of the Donbas, which Mr Putin is intent on capturing. There is, in fact, not a little scepticism among Western commentators on how far Mr Putin will be able to carry out his threat to up the nuclear ante. Western nuclear experts, for instance, point to the timelines Mr Putin announced in his press conference. They say Russia has been working on building a nuclear storage facility in Kaliningrad, a Russian exclave situated between Lithuania and Poland, for the past seven years and no satellite imagery has appeared suggesting that a similar base was under construction in Belarus.
 

Even if overblown, the weekend’s rhetoric is worrying because it marks a sharp U-turn from Mr Putin’s joint statement made only last Tuesday with Chinese President Xi Jinping that all nuclear-weapon states should refrain from deploying nuclear weapons beyond their borders. It is also somewhat at odds with the Russian foreign ministry’s attempts last month to dial down Mr Putin’s rhetoric on New Start, suggesting that suspension was not tantamount to withdrawal. It clarified to its US counterpart that Russia would continue to abide by the limits set by the treaty and continue to share information on planned launches of intercontinental and submarine-launched missiles. These confusing signals from the Kremlin point to posturing rather than substantive moves in response to NATO intensifying its support to Ukraine. But post-war history has shown the escalatory dangers of such moves. Despite the Western cynicism about Russia’s nuclear offensive capabilities, Mr Putin’s rhetoric must be taken seriously.