High Adviser to the President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky
Russian President Vladimir Putin announced the choice on Saturday, sending a warning to NATO over its military support for Ukraine and an escalating standoff with the West.
While the move was not unexpected, and Putin has said he is not going to violate non-proliferation guarantees, it’s one in all Russia’s clearest nuclear signals for the reason that invasion of Ukraine began 13 months ago.
Secretary of the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine Oleksiy Danilov addresses the media in Kiev, Ukraine, February 23, 2022.
Press Office of the President of Ukraine | Reuters
Oleksiy Danilov, head of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, called it “a step towards internal destabilization of the country”, adding that it maximizes what he called “negative perception and public rejection” of Russia and Putin in Belarusian society.
“(K)remlin has taken Belarus as a nuclear hostage,” he tweeted.
Putin likened his plans to the US stationing weapons in Europe and said Russia wouldn’t hand over arms control to Belarus.
“We should not handing over (weapons). And the US doesn’t give (them) to its allies. Principally, we’re doing what they have been doing for a decade,” Putin said.
Nonetheless, this will likely be the primary time for the reason that mid-Nineteen Nineties that Russia has placed such weapons outside the country. Experts told Reuters the event was significant because Russia had up to now prided itself on not having deployed nuclear weapons beyond its borders, unlike the US.
One other senior adviser to Zelensky on Sunday mocked Putin’s plan, saying the Russian leader was “too predictable.”
“Commenting on tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus, he admits that he’s afraid of losing and the one thing he can do is threaten with tactics,” Mykhailo Podoliak wrote on Twitter.
Washington, the world’s second nuclear superpower, downplayed concerns about Putin’s announcement and Moscow’s possible use of nuclear weapons in a war in Ukraine.
“We saw no reason to correct our own strategic nuclear posture, nor any signs that Russia was preparing to use nuclear weapons. We remain committed to the collective defense of the NATO alliance,” said a senior U.S. administration official.
The official noted that Russia and Belarus had been discussing the transfer of nuclear weapons for a while.
Tactical nuclear weapons refer to weapons used for specific purposes on the battlefield, not to destroy cities. It will not be clear what number of such weapons Russia provided, that is an area still shrouded in mystery of the Cold War.
Analysts on the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War (ISW) said on Saturday that the danger of escalating to nuclear war “stays very low.”
“ISW continues to assess Putin as a risk-averse actor who repeatedly threatens to use nuclear weapons with none intention of execution,” it said.
Nonetheless, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons called Putin’s statement a particularly dangerous escalation.
“Within the context of the war in Ukraine, the likelihood of miscalculation or misinterpretation is amazingly high. Sharing nuclear weapons greatly aggravates the situation and threatens with catastrophic humanitarian consequences,” it said on Twitter.
Putin Condemns the ‘Western Axis’
Putin said Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko had been asking for the deployment for a very long time. There was no immediate response from Lukashenko.
While the Belarusian army has not formally fought in Ukraine, Minsk and Moscow have close military relations. Minsk allowed Moscow to use Belarusian territory to send troops to Ukraine last 12 months, and the 2 nations stepped up joint military training.
On Sunday, Putin also denied that Moscow was forming a military alliance with Beijing and as a substitute asserted that Western powers were constructing a recent “axis” similar to the partnership between Germany and Japan during World War II.
“That is why Western analysts … say that the West is starting to construct a recent axis, similar to the one created in the Nineteen Thirties by the fascist regimes of Germany and Italy and militaristic Japan,” Putin said.
This was in retaliation for a theme he often used in his portrayals of the war in Ukraine – that Moscow is fighting Ukraine in the grip of alleged Nazis, instigated by Western powers threatening Russia.
Ukraine – which was a part of the Soviet Union and itself suffered devastation by the hands of Nazi forces – rejects these similarities as false pretexts for a war of imperial conquest.
On the battlefield, Ukraine has shown more optimism in recent days because the brutal battle for the eastern city of Bakhmut continues for several months.
Bakhmut is the primary goal of Russia, which is trying to fully take over the industrialized region of Donbass in Ukraine. At one point, Russian commanders expressed the assumption that the town would soon fall, but such claims were silenced by heavy fighting.
Ukrainian forces managed to suppress a Russian offensive near Bakhmut, where the situation is stabilizing, the commander-in-chief of the armed forces, General Valery Zaluzhny, said on Saturday.
The General Staff said on Sunday that Ukrainian forces had repelled 85 Russian attacks in the past 24 hours in several parts of the Eastern Front, including in the Bakhmut area.