Are Russian nuclear warheads in Belarus a real threat to the West?
The recent movement of tactical nuclear weapons from Russia to Belarus, as reported by Western military officials and echoed by Foreign Policy, is a significant geopolitical development. This move, announced by Russian President Vladimir Putin last June , is likely aimed at increasing pressure on NATO's eastern flank. It fits into a context of years in which the nuclear threat has been brandished by Russia to scare the West and induce it to reduce support for Ukraine. However, NATO leaders argue that the shift does not dramatically change the nature of Russian military threats to the alliance.
Arvydas Anusauskas, Lithuania's defense minister, was the first senior official within NATO to confirm news of the deployment. He warned that the risks of Western inaction were high, citing the weak response the West received when Russia moved more nuclear weapons to the Kaliningrad enclave, bordering Poland and Lithuania. “We would like to see a tougher response on this,” Anusauskas said. “If the Russians bring nuclear weapons closer to us, we have to move too.”
The nuclear issue has been on the minds of Western leaders since the beginning of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Senior US officials believed that Putin raised the possibility of using low-yield tactical nuclear weapons in 2022 as he faced Ukrainian victories and significant battlefield setbacks, before the conflict devolved into a stalemate. the next year.
Putin has not removed that threat from the table, even in the conflict's current state of relative impasse. On Wednesday, shortly before the Russian presidential elections, he forcefully relaunched the issue. “From a military-technical point of view, we are obviously ready,” Putin told broadcaster Rossiya-1 and the RIA news agency about the prospect of nuclear war with the West, when asked about threats to Russian sovereignty. The Russian leader denied, however, that he was considering the use of tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine in 2022, arguing that there was “never a need for it”.
The deployment in Belarus is a symbol of Russian nuclear deterrence
Russia has enormous nuclear deterrent potential, with over 5,500 usable nuclear warheads, both tactical and strategic. A very high number, much higher than the 3,700 active in the USA or the 225 in the United Kingdom. Obviously, with this abundance, Moscow has no problem in relocating a few dozen newspapers to its neighboring ally, Belarus.
Western intelligence officials and open-source observers have spent months tracking the Russian deployment in the allied country, which Putin himself called a warning to the West. The weapons move to Belarus marks one of the westernmost deployment points of the Kremlin's nuclear arsenal.
The movement of its nuclear weapons has a clear political signaling intent, but for some experts it does not imply a real military relevance: the alliance does not face major or minor threats, simply because the weapons were brought a few hundred kilometers closer to NATO territory. “The Russians can reach anywhere in NATO with the nuclear missiles they have on their territory,” said Rose Gottemoeller, a former US arms control envoy and NATO deputy secretary general. “This doesn't change the threat environment at all. It is, therefore, a purely political message." So launching them from the borders with Poland or near Moscow doesn't change much.
Other experts go further, arguing that if you publicly respond to the movement of nuclear weapons to Belarus, you are simply playing into Russia's hands. “What difference does it make, really?” Hanno Pevkur, Estonia's defense minister, told Foreign Policy. “That's why any discussion like 'Jesus, we have a nuclear weapon in Belarus, look what happens,' is just absurd. It is part of the Russian plan to divert attention from Ukraine and have extra topics on the discussion agenda. But in reality, it makes no difference to how Russia behaves.”
In this scenario, Putin could strengthen the nuclear threat against NATO in the near future, especially if he sees Western military support for Ukraine faltering. On the other hand, the West's determination against nuclear blackmail is growing. “[Putin] wants to make sure there is room for disquiet” in current U.S. and European debates about whether to continue supporting Ukraine, Gottemoeller said. “For Ukraine and NATO allies in Europe, it's not that they are immune to these threats, but they no longer have that shock value that they had in the early days of the invasion.”
A new unclassified US intelligence assessment released last week concluded that Russia likely does not want to engage in direct military conflict with NATO. It has, however, been highlighted that the Kremlin will rely more on nuclear weapons to deter the US and the alliance as it rebuilds its ground forces.
Amid the deterioration of US-Russia relations in recent years, and their ultimate collapse following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, both sides have abandoned decades-old arms control treaties. Now only one agreement remains in force: the New START treaty, which the Kremlin unilaterally suspended last year. The treaty sets the maximum number of deployed warheads, missiles, bombers and strategic nuclear missile launchers that either country can have, but does not apply to new weapons Russia has built in recent years. (The Pentagon estimates that Russia has 2,000 nonstrategic nuclear weapons not covered by the treaty.)
NATO representatives stressed at the Munich Security Conference in February that Russia has done nothing since the start of the all-out invasion of Ukraine to coerce the nuclear-armed countries of the alliance – the United States, France and the United Kingdom – to change attitudes. The United States has tactical nuclear weapons in at least six European bases.
Therefore the redeployment of warheads in Belarus should not be seen as an increase in the Russian military threat, but, more importantly, as an international, internal and foreign political signal. Internally, Putin shows that in any case there are countries that are closely allied. It shows Belarus both its absolute support and the fact that, in any case, Russia exercises a certain form of control over the country. However, it demonstrates its tactical unscrupulousness to the West, without increasing the overall level of threat. A very clever move politically and the real answer to Finland's entry into NATO.
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The article Are Russian nuclear warheads in Belarus a real threat to the West? comes from Economic Scenarios .
This is a machine translation of a post published on Scenari Economici at the URL https://scenarieconomici.it/le-testate-nucleari-russe-in-bielorussia-sono-una-vera-minaccia-per-loccidente/ on Mon, 01 Apr 2024 10:00:01 +0000.