Russia said this spring that it would send tactical nuclear weapons to Belarus, and on Tuesday President Alexander Lukashenko said he has received some of them. This development is another escalation by Vladimir Putin and another indication of Moscow’s takeover of Minsk.
Mr. Putin helped Mr. Lukashenko quell the 2020 protests against the Belarusian government, but at a price for Belarus independence. Military integration is a key component of Russia’s slow-rolling annexation of Belarus.
Mr. Putin has positioned Russian troops in Belarus and used its territory to launch Russian ground forces and missiles to attack Ukraine. Russia has also stationed S-400 surface-to-air and Iskander short-range missile systems there. Belarus’s Defense Ministry said in April that Russia helped train its soldiers on the use of tactical nuclear weapons, and now Mr. Lukashenko says they’re in-country.
Amid last weekend’s chaos in Russia, Mr. Lukashenko positioned himself as a mediator between Mr. Putin and the mercenary warlord-turned-rebel Yevgeny Prigozhin, and the Belarusian no doubt hopes to leverage this role for more influence with the Kremlin. Yet the deployment of tactical nuclear weapons that Mr. Putin will control is another step in the erosion of Belarus’s sovereignty.
Like Ukraine, Belarus gave up its nuclear weapons after the fall of the Soviet Union. Russia’s war in Ukraine will discourage other countries from surrendering their nuclear weapons, and now Mr. Putin is proliferating them. The Kremlin knows that its nuclear saber-rattling has had some effect on Western calculations of how much to support Ukraine, and his deployment of nuclear weapons to Belarus is another failure of Western deterrence.
Russia’s nuclear deployment also illustrates what Mr. Putin had in mind for a Kremlin-controlled Ukraine. The West helps its own security when it helps Ukraine defeat Russia.
