Putin warns the West of Russian tactical nukes being put in Belarus

• Putin made a fresh set of nuclear threats this week after confirming Russian warheads were moved to Belarus.
• The Russian president said the escalatory step was meant to serve as a warning to the West.
• US and Western intelligence officials, however, were quick to brush off Putin’s most recent threats.

Vladimir Putin issued a weighty warning to the West this week as he announced a first tranche of Russian tactical nuclear weapons has been stationed in neighboring Belarus as a stop-gap against a possible “strategic defeat” in Ukraine.

At an economic forum in St. Petersburg on Friday, Putin said the warheads would only be used if Russia’s territory was threatened, echoing the same empty threats the Russian president has frequently espoused since the war began in February 2022.

US and Western officials quickly brushed off Putin’s most recent batch of nuclear threats. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Friday there are no indications that Russia is preparing to actually use a nuclear weapon and NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said that while the organization has seen “some preparations” from Russia, there have been no noted changes in “Russia’s nuclear posture.”

“This is part of nuclear messaging and nuclear rhetoric that we have seen over some time, a part of a pattern we have seen over several years,” Stoltenberg said in Friday comments, “where Russia has modernized nuclear weapons, deployed more nuclear weapons – also up in the High North – but now also for the first time permanently deploying weapons to Belarus.”

Putin first said in March that Russia planned to move tactical weapons to Belarus, which served as a launching pad for the country’s Ukraine invasion more than a year ago.

The Russian president compared the move to the deployment of US nuclear weapons in various European countries over the years. This is the first time Moscow has moved such weapons outside its own country since the Soviet Union fell. 

At the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum on Friday, Putin said the escalatory move was meant to prioritize “containment” and send a message to any country “thinking of inflicting a strategic defeat on us,” according to BBC News and Reuters, explicitly invoking the US, which continues to support and supply Ukraine with weapons and equipment. 

“Why should we threaten the whole world?” Putin responded when asked about the likelihood of using the weapons. “I have already said that the use of extreme measures is possible in case there is a danger to Russian statehood.”

Belarusian President Aleksandr Lukashenko said on Tuesday that Belarus had begun accepting delivery of the Russian warheads, some of which are more than three times as powerful as the atomic bombs the US dropped in Japan in 1945, according to Reuters. 

Putin said this week that the transfer of the weapons to Belarus would be done by the end of summer. 

The Russian president has threatened or hinted at the possibility of using nuclear weapons so many times since the war in Ukraine began that experts and civilians alike are increasingly ignoring him. An expert on Russia and Ukraine told Insider last year that the president’s threats are most likely meant to manipulate global society by sowing confusion and fear.