A Desperate Putin Escalates His Nuclear Threats

Moving nuclear weapons to Belarus is a sign of his weakness.

I had a long talk with my friend and nuclear policy expert John Pike yesterday after Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko announced that he had signed a deal with Vladimir Putin to station Russian nuclear weapons in his country. Neither of us could recall any other time that a nuclear-armed state had flushed weapons from garrison and moved them to the field. This is, in effect, what Putin is doing.

The closest we came was in the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, but that involved Soviet trawlers carrying nuclear-capable missiles, not warheads. Russia had already secretly moved warheads to Cuba, unbeknownst to the U.S.

Unlike missiles in Cuba, this move doesn’t make much military sense. Russia already has hundreds, perhaps thousands, of short- and medium-range nuclear weapons on the border of Ukraine and within range of major European countries. Moving them a few hundred miles west doesn’t add much capability.

So, why is he doing it? As I told CNN’s John Vause last night, he’s desperate.

Putin is losing his war on Ukraine. He has exhausted his military options. His Pyrrhic capture of Bakhmut has cost the lives of tens of thousands of his mercenaries — so many that Wagner Group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin said he is leaving the field and transferring control of the city to regular Russian troops (who may soon lose it back to Ukrainian forces).

For nineteen months, Putin has been threatening to use nuclear weapons if Ukraine and the West don’t back down. Defying his nuclear blackmail, Ukraine has fought harder; Wester aid has increased in quantity and quality. Now, Putin is going from wild threats to physically moving weapons.

As I told Vauss (you can just watch the interview if you want to skip reading the rest of this newsletter), there is more that we don’t know about this move than we do know. Has the transfer actually begun? When will the weapons arrive? What kind of weapons? Did Putin begin moving these weapons from the Belgorad Oblast storage site while it was under attack from anti-Russian forces?

But Putin’s goal is clear. He wants to raise fears of nuclear war in order to get the West to back down. He wants a ceasefire that will keep his murderous troops in control of large parts of Eastern Ukraine, allowing him to thwart the expected Ukrainian counter-offensive, and buying time to regroup and plot his next move. In the process, he raises the risk of nuclear accidents as a Russian army that has proven inept at conventional military operations now starts an unprecedented movement of nuclear weapons during a war.

We can expect that Putin will increase the threats. Expect videos and photos of trains or truck convoys moving the weapons, visits of Russian nuclear officers to Belarus, and a ramp-up of Russian propaganda, both its own and that generated by Western groups and experts who mirror Putin’s line and demand an immediate ceasefire.

Putin’s transfer of weapons is not just crazy, it’s illegal. It violates Belarusian commitments under the Non-Proliferation Treaty, the Budapest Memorandum of 1994, and the Belarus Constitution. It also violates Putin’s own pledge, made just to months ago in a joint statement with China that ““All nuclear-weapon states should refrain from deploying nuclear weapons abroad and withdraw nuclear weapons deployed abroad.”

Belarusian opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya has denounced the move and called upon Western leaders to impose new sanctions and take serious steps to stop the transfer. So far, the Wester response has been tepid. At a minimum, the U.S. should share what it knows about the planned movements.

For now, we should track these movements. Follow experts like Pike at GlobalSecurity.org, Steve Pifer at Stanford University and Hans Kristensen at the Federation of American Scientists, and journalists like Vause at CNN and Hanna Liubakova, now at the Atlantic Council.

We should also prepare our responses to two developments. The more immediate is how we should respond to Putin’s efforts to stoke nuclear panic. In the longer term, it is not too soon to consider what we should do to prevent these kinds of nuclear threats in the future.

After Ukraine defeats Putin, we will have a brief window in which to advance policies — like pledges never to use nuclear weapons first in combat, deep cuts in nuclear arsenals and banning all nuclear weapons — that could both blunt nuclear threats and prevent the use of the most deadly weapons humankind has ever invented.