Russia’s Nuclear Weapons Are Now in Belarus

foreignpolicy.com ^ | 3/14/2024 | Jack Detsch and Robbie Gramer

[bitt]

The move sends a clear political message, but some experts downplay its military significance.

Russia has moved tactical nuclear weapons from its own borders into neighboring Belarus, several hundred miles closer to NATO territory, Western officials confirmed to Foreign Policy, as Russian President Vladimir Putin threatens a wider military showdown with the alliance over its continued support for Ukraine.

The move, which Putin first announced in June of last year, is likely aimed at ramping up pressure on NATO’s eastern flank. It follows years of nuclear saber-rattling intended to scare the West into paring back its support for Ukraine, now in its third year of war against Russia’s invasion, though top NATO officials insist that the move doesn’t drastically change the nature of Russia’s military threats to NATO.

Arvydas Anusauskas, Lithuania’s defense minister, was the first top official within the NATO alliance to confirm the news of the deployment. He warned that the risks of Western inaction were high, citing the lackluster response in the West to Russia moving more nuclear weapons to the Kaliningrad Peninsula, which is bounded by Poland and Lithuania on either side.

“We would like to see a harder response on that,” Anusauskas said. “If [the] Russians move nuclear weapons closer to us, we need to move as well.”

The nuclear question has hung over the heads of Western leaders ever since Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine. Top U.S. officials believed that Putin floated the possibility of using limited-yield tactical nuclear weapons in 2022 as he faced Ukrainian victories and significant battlefield setbacks before the conflict ground into a stalemate the following year.

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