Sometime this summer, if President Vladimir Putin can be believed, Russia moved some of its short-range nuclear weapons into Belarus, closer to Ukraine and onto Nato’s doorstep. | AP
While some experts doubt the claims by Putin and Lukashenko, others note that Western intelligence might be unable to monitor such movement.
“They easily fit in a regular Il-76 transport plane,” Alesin said. “There are dozens of flights a day, and it’s very difficult to track down that special flight. The Americans could fail to monitor it.” The world faces a confrontation “far worse than during the Cuban missile crisis because our enemies have decided to really defeat Russia, the largest nuclear power,” he wrote.In this photo taken from video provided by the Russian Defense Ministry Press Service on Jan. 25, 2022, the Russian army’s Iskander missile launchers and support vehicles prepare to deploy for drills in Russia. AP FILE PHOTO
“The possibility of using nuclear weapons in the current conflict mustn’t be concealed,” said Dmitry Trenin, who headed the Moscow Carnegie Center for 14 years before joining Moscow’s state-funded Institute for World Economy and International Relations. “It’s necessary to restore the fear of nuclear escalation; otherwise mankind is doomed,” he said, suggesting Russia establish a “ladder” of accelerating actions.
The Moscow-based Council of Foreign and Defense Policies, a panel of leading military and foreign policy experts that includes Karaganov, denounced his comments as “a direct threat to all of mankind.” The West should recognize this as a ploy “that has far more to do with Russia’s ambitions for Belarus than any genuine impact on European security beyond that,” Giles said.Miles Pomper, a senior fellow at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Middlebury Institute, challenged Lukashenko’s claim that nuclear weapons were covertly flown to Belarus.
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