KIEV, March 26 (Portal) – A senior national security adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Sunday that Russian plans to deploy tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus would destabilize that country, which he says has been “held hostage” by Moscow .
Russian President Vladimir Putin announced the decision on Saturday, sending a warning to NATO about its military support for Ukraine and escalating a standoff with the West.
Although the move was not unexpected and Putin said it would not violate his non-proliferation pledge, it is one of the clearest nuclear signals from Russia since it began invading Ukraine 13 months ago.
Oleksiy Danilov, head of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, called it “a step towards the country’s internal destabilization,” adding it maximizes what he calls the level of “negative perceptions and public resentment” of Russia and Putin in the Belarusian society called.
“The (K)remlin have taken Belarus as a nuclear hostage,” he wrote on Twitter.
Putin compared his plans to stationing US arms in Europe and said Russia would not transfer control of the arms to Belarus. However, this may be the first time Russia has stationed such weapons outside the country since the mid-1990s.
Another senior Zelenskyi aide scoffed at Putin’s plan on Sunday, saying the Russian leader was “too predictable”.
“By making a statement about tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus, he admits he’s scared of losing and all he can do is scare with tactics,” Mykhailo Podolyak tweeted.
Washington, the world’s other nuclear superpower, downplayed concerns about Putin’s announcement and the potential for Moscow to use nuclear weapons in the war in Ukraine.
“We have seen no reason to adjust our own strategic nuclear position, nor any indication that Russia is preparing to use a nuclear weapon. We remain committed to the collective defense of the NATO alliance,” said a senior US official.
The official noted that Russia and Belarus had been talking about nuclear weapons transfers for some time.
Analysts at the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War (ISW) said in a note late Saturday that the risk of escalation to nuclear war “remains extremely low.”
“ISW continues to believe that Putin is a risk-averse actor who has repeatedly threatened to use nuclear weapons with no intention of doing so to break the West’s resolve,” he wrote.
However, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons called Putin’s announcement an extremely dangerous escalation.
“In connection with the war in Ukraine, the probability of misjudgment or misinterpretation is extremely high. Sharing nuclear weapons greatly aggravates the situation and risks catastrophic humanitarian consequences,” it said on Twitter.
PUTIN SHORTS A WESTERN “AXIS”
Putin said Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko had long called for the deployment. There was no immediate reaction from Lukashenko.
While the Belarusian army has not officially fought in Ukraine, Minsk and Moscow have close military ties. Minsk last year allowed Moscow to use Belarusian territory to send troops to Ukraine, and the two nations stepped up joint military training.
Putin also denied on Sunday that Moscow was building a military alliance with Beijing, instead claiming that the western powers were building a new “axis” similar to the partnership between Germany and Japan during World War II.
“That’s why Western analysts are talking about the West beginning to build a new axis similar to that created by the fascist regimes of Germany and Italy and militarist Japan in the 1930s,” Putin said.
This was in retaliation for a theme he often used in his account of the Ukraine war – that Moscow is fighting a Ukraine gripped by perceived Nazis, backed by Western powers that threaten Russia.
Ukraine – which was part of the Soviet Union and was itself devastated by Hitler’s forces – dismisses these parallels as a false pretext for an imperial war of conquest.
On the battlefield, Ukraine has shown more optimism in recent days about the brutal month-long struggle for the eastern city of Bakhmut.
Bakhmut is a key Russian target as it seeks to fully conquer Ukraine’s industrialized Donbass region. At one point, Russian commanders expressed confidence that the city would soon fall, but such claims have waned amid heavy fighting.
Ukrainian forces have managed to blunt Russia’s offensive in and around Bakhmut, where the situation is stabilizing, Commander-in-Chief General Valery Zaluzhniy said on Saturday.
The General Staff said on Sunday Ukrainian forces repelled 85 Russian attacks in several parts of the Eastern Front, including the Bakhmut region, over the past 24 hours.
Reporting by Dan Peleschuk Editing by Frances Kerry
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