Ex-US national security adviser says Putin may be serious about deploying nukes in Belarus

WASHINGTON

Former US national security adviser John Bolton said Monday that Russian President Vladimir Putin “may not be bluffing” about moving 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 said in an interview with CNN.

However, Bolton said that even if Putin did that, it wouldn't 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 said.

“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 said Saturday that his country will complete the construction of a special storage facility for tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus.

Russia has already handed over to Belarus the Iskander missile system that is capable of carrying nuclear weapons, Putin said in an interview on TV channel Rossiya-24.

According to Putin, his Belarusian counterpart Alexander Lukashenko has long raised the issue of deploying Russian tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus, which have not been present there since the early 1990s, 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 agency TASS quoted Putin as saying.

US National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby, however, said 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."