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.
The declared deployment of the Russian weapons on the territory of its neighbour and loyal ally marks a new stage in the Kremlin's nuclear sabre-rattling over its invasion of Ukraine and another bid to discourage the West from increasing military support to Kyiv.
The devices are compact: Used on bombs, missiles and artillery shells, they could be discreetly carried on a truck or plane. Aliaksandr Alesin, an independent Minsk-based military analyst, said the weapons use containers that emit no radiation and could have been flown into Belarus without Western intelligence seeing it.
Dmitry Medvedev, the deputy head of Russia's Security Council who served as a placeholder president in 2008-12 because Putin was term-limited, unleashes near-daily threats that Moscow won't hesitate to use nuclear weapons. Moscow's defence doctrine envisages a nuclear response to an atomic strike or even an attack with conventional weapons that "threaten the very existence of the Russian state." That vague wording has led some Russian experts to urge the Kremlin to spell out those conditions in more detail and force the West to take the warnings more seriously.
Sergei Karaganov, a top Russian foreign affairs expert who advises Putin's Security Council, said Moscow should make its nuclear threats more specific in order to "break the will of the West" and force it to stop supporting Ukraine as it seeks to reclaim Russian-held areas in a grinding counteroffensive.
"If we build the right strategy of intimidation and even the use of it, the risk of a retaliatory nuclear or any other strike on our territory could be reduced to a minimum," he said. "Only if a madman who hates his own country sits in the White House would America risk to launch a strike `in the defence' of the Europeans and draw a response, sacrificing Boston for Poznan."
Giles, of Chatham House, said the deployment was about "cementing Putin's control over Belarus" and did not offer Moscow any military advantage over placing them in Russia's Baltic exclave of Kaliningrad that borders Poland and Lithuania. Alesin, the Minsk-based analyst, argued that U.S. and NATO may play down the deployment of nuclear weapons to Belarus because they pose a threat the West finds difficult to counter.
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