The Cynic

Let’s talk about the meeting between Putin and Lukashenko.

The following was said:

1) “The project of the Union State has been fully coordinated.” It sounds and in the future is a factor in the complete annexation of Belarus with the actual loss of independence and sovereignty. However, practice shows that every new conversation about the Union State ends at the same point from which it began. Some pieces of paper and multi-page “maps” are signed, but no one executes them and does not even plan to execute them. The one who was supposed to monitor the execution of the clauses of the contract – Gryzlov – generally left the information reality and, together with the Palace, oversees trade in all its “special” manifestations.

The Union State is a spherical horse in a vacuum. The military occupation was carried out without taking into account the provisions of the Union State, the attacks from the territory of Belarus were carried out without the will of the SG, which means that further activities to absorb the Belarusian statehood can be implemented without the “union integration” project. Then why this declarative, but having no real weight, mention of “everything is signed” at every meeting?

And here we are dealing with a purely emotional factor – Putin (and you pay attention to his facial expressions) enjoys when he talks about SG cards. This is purely his story of building a new USSR. He feels like a new “varnished corpse from the Mausoleum” – the progenitor of the project of the new Russian Empire.

In fact, pure fixation on Putin’s internal factors of excitation – his “mission” is allegedly being realized.

And Lukashenka is not against stimulating the erogenous zones of the Kremlin prisoner for one and a half billion. This is such an elite brothel with signs of a “Dutch steering wheel”.

You make me feel good with stories about SG – I give you one and a half billion.

2) Within the next few months, the Russian Federation will transfer the Iskander-M complexes to Minsk.

This complex is capable of carrying both conventional and nuclear warheads. Thus, Moscow is violating the nuclear non-proliferation treaty.

And this means that NATO, for its part, can also supply the countries of Eastern Europe with equipment that is possible both for conventional strikes and for nuclear strikes – and this will be a proportional reaction.

However, at the moment there are no special risks for Kyiv from the “Minsk” Iskanders. The Russians are already skating freely, but they will be handed over to Lukashenka “within a few months.”

This means that they clearly cannot be used in the current hostilities.

So it was rather a threat not to Kyiv, but to the West. Russia is introducing a nuclear factor into the regions under its control so that the liberation of these territories from the Kremlin’s influence is impossible, due to the automatic activation of the “allied” doctrine of nuclear weapons.

So, Putin will actually “attach” Minsk to himself, as well as separatist formations.

3) Lukashenka told Putin that the isolation of Kaliningrad by Lithuania is in fact a declaration of war.

Moreover, Lithuania announced that even despite the possibility of the EU to revise the sanctions policy towards the Koenigsberg exclave, it will exercise its right to control the transportation of goods.

Thus, the conflict turns into a clear escalation, on the crest of which is Lithuania, and behind it is the Western world. The West is not going to retreat from the sanctions policy, and Moscow has no options for a non-military response – they were going to turn off the electricity, but they discovered with horror that Lithuania had already stopped buying it.

Military intervention will activate NATO, even though the Kremlin believes that the Western world will not harness for the Baltic countries.

So here Moscow is in a position of a complete crisis of power.

4) At night, Putin mysteriously returned to the Kremlin in a “cortege”.

Kyiv was bombed at night – simultaneously with the launch of the G7.

The finished vindictive stalk is escalating the situation, trying to frame his threats as readiness for a nuclear war for the “corridor” to Koenigsberg.

Now they are again reporting about aircraft over the territory of Belarus – they will be used to attack on the territory of Ukraine – they will hit residential premises. Intentionally. We need a flow of refugees.

So, we have the official transcript of the conversation between Putin and Lukashenko, in which the nuclear topic surfaced:
http://kremlin.ru/events/president/news/68702

Let’s try to collect what follows from it.

1) Lukashenka expressed concern about the exercises of NATO countries with the participation of nuclear weapons carriers in the immediate vicinity of the borders of the Union State and suggested considering “the question of a mirror answer to these things, without busting.”

2) Lukashenka asked for help to “adapt” the existing Belarusian aircraft to the use of nuclear weapons. I mentioned the Su-35, but they are not there. Apparently, he had in mind the Su-30SM.

3) Lukashenka emphasized that we are not talking about the deployment of nuclear warheads directly on the territory of Belarus, at least in the short term.

4) Putin spoke about 200 tactical nuclear weapons on the territory of six NATO countries in Europe, and about 257 certified aircraft of NATO countries. Not exactly news. He confirmed that Russia has no bases with nuclear weapons outside the national territory.

5) Putin did not want to “mirror”, but offered to “appropriately retrofit” the Belarusian Su-25 in Russia, with the appropriate training of pilots. Su-25s are not always recorded as TNW carriers, but there seem to be no particular obstacles. In addition to the fact that in general this is not the most obvious choice, especially in NATO, for example, the F-35 will become the main carrier of a similar class in the future.

6) Putin announced the transfer of the Iskander-M OTRK to the Belarusian Armed Forces in the coming months, and emphasized their “dual purpose”, i.e. the ability to use cruise and (aero)ballistic missiles in conventional and nuclear equipment.

Now the questions that are of great concern to us:

a) Will item 3 be formalized?

b) Is it really about the Su-25 (p. 5) or, nevertheless, about other aircraft? Moreover, do we understand correctly that “refurbishment” is about adaptation to “nuclear” tasks?

c) What kind of “Iskanders” (clause 6), in what configuration, in what quantity (division? brigade?) and under what conditions (sale? netting on the chassis? leasing?) will end up in Belarus? Where will they be based? The topic is so something very old, and very toxic.

d) All together, this is very puzzling in the context of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons and our traditional position on the violation by the United States and NATO countries of its paragraphs 1 and 2, which are traditionally understood as a ban on creating conditions for nuclear powers to use non-nuclear weapons. By the way, we also have a relatively recent CSTO statement on this matter:

The CSTO member states urge the states parties to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons that possess nuclear weapons to limit their deployment on their territories without deploying them abroad, to eliminate all infrastructure that allows for the rapid deployment of these weapons on the territory of non-nuclear states, to refrain from conducting exercises related to the development of skills in the use of nuclear weapons by the personnel of the armed forces of states that do not possess such weapons.

We also recall that after the amendments to the Constitution of the Republic of Belarus and the renewal of the Military Doctrine of the Union State, there are no formal obstacles to the deployment of nuclear weapons on Belarusian territory, which was noted at one time, incl. and in Western research organizations. Well, apart from the collapse of the mentioned narrative about violations of the NPT by the US and NATO…

By the way, it is possible that these initiatives will have an impact on discussions around the fate of the Russia-NATO Founding Act, and indeed the current state. Recall:

http://kremlin.ru/events/president/news/68702

NATO member states confirm that they have no intentions, plans or reasons for deploying nuclear weapons on the territory of new members and do not need to change any aspect of NATO’s nuclear force posture or NATO nuclear policy, nor do they foresee the need to do so in the future.