Former US nationwide safety adviser John Bolton mentioned Monday that Russian President Vladimir Putin “may not be bluffing” about transferring tactical nuclear weapons into neighboring Belarus.
“Well, I think he’s been bluffing when he’s tried to rattle the nuclear saber before. He may not be bluffing here in the sense he may actually move tactical nuclear weapons into Belarus, which is its own separate problem,” Bolton mentioned in an interview with CNN.
However, Bolton mentioned that even when Putin did that, it would not make “much difference” in his view, “because of what we know are extensive nuclear supplies, missiles, cruise missiles, drones and warheads, in Kaliningrad, an exclave, a piece of Russia that’s separated from Russia itself by Lithuania and Poland.”
“That’s a place which has long been basically a Russian military facility going back to Soviet Union days,” he mentioned.
“So the capabilities Russia already has in the Kaliningrad enclave are the ones that could be most threatening. I don’t think the idea of moving some tactical nuclear weapons into Belarus changes that balance,” he added.
Putin mentioned Saturday that his nation will full the development of a particular storage facility for tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus.
Russia has already handed over to Belarus the Iskander missile system that’s able to carrying nuclear weapons, Putin mentioned in an interview on TV channel Rossiya-24.
According to Putin, his Belarusian counterpart Alexander Lukashenko has lengthy raised the difficulty of deploying Russian tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus, which haven’t been current there because the early Nineties, when the Soviet Union fell.
“We agreed with Lukashenko that we would place tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus without violating the nonproliferation regime,” Russian news company TASS quoted Putin as saying.
US National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby, nonetheless, mentioned the Biden administration has not “seen any movement of any tactical nuclear weapons or anything of that kind since this announcement, and we certainly haven’t seen any indication that Mr. Putin has made some sort of decision to use weapons of mass destruction, let alone nuclear weapons inside Ukraine.”
Source: www.anews.com.tr
