Putin warns that West Russia has sent nuclear weapons to Belarus

President Vladimir Putin said on Friday that his use of tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus, which he confirmed for the first time to have already taken place, was a reminder to the West that it could not inflict a strategic defeat on Russia.

Putin said at Russia’s flagship economic forum in St. Petersburg that Russian tactical nuclear warheads had already been delivered to close ally Belarus, but stressed that he saw no need for Russia to resort to nuclear weapons for the time being.

“As you know, we negotiated with our ally (the President of Belarus (Alexander) Lukashenko that we would transfer part of these tactical nuclear weapons to the territory of Belarus – that happened,” Putin said.

“The first nuclear warheads were delivered on the territory of Belarus. But only the first, the first part. But we will have this work fully completed by the end of the summer or by the end of the year.”

The move, called Moscow’s first use of such warheads — shorter-range nuclear weapons that could potentially be used on the battlefield — outside Russia since the fall of the Soviet Union, was meant as a warning to the West to arm and support Russia’s leader, Ukraine.

“…It’s just there as a deterrent, so that those who are thinking about inflicting a strategic defeat on us wouldn’t be aware of that fact,” Putin said, using a diplomatic term for a defeat so severe that it eroded Russia’s power been weakened for decades on the world stage.

Lukashenko, a staunch Putin ally, said late Tuesday his country had begun supplying Russian tactical nuclear weapons, including about three times the atomic bombs the US dropped on Japan in 1945.

The Russian leader announced in March that he had agreed to the stationing of tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus, citing decades of US stationing of such weapons in numerous European countries.

Putin says the West wants a strategic defeat

The United States has criticized Putin’s decision but said it has no intention of changing its own stance on strategic nuclear weapons and has seen no signs that Russia is preparing to use a nuclear weapon.

Nonetheless, the Russian move is being watched closely by Washington and its allies, as well as by China, which has repeatedly warned against using nuclear weapons in the war in Ukraine.

Putin said the West is doing everything it can to inflict a strategic defeat on Russia in Ukraine, where Moscow finds itself in the biggest land war in Europe since World War II, after invading its neighbor last year in a so-called “special military operation”. had marched in.

But Russia has no need to resort to nuclear weapons for now, Putin said, signaling that Moscow’s nuclear stance, which envisages such a move only if the very existence of the Russian state is threatened, will not be changed.

“Nuclear weapons were made to ensure our security in the broadest sense of the word and the existence of the Russian state, but we … have no such need (to use them),” Putin said.

But he said talks with the West about reducing Russia’s vast nuclear arsenal, the largest in the world, were a failure.

“Just talking about it (the potential use of nuclear weapons) lowers the nuclear threshold. We have more than the NATO countries and they want to reduce our numbers. Fuck it,” Putin said.

Defiantly addressing his country’s political and business elite, he said that a Ukrainian counter-offensive against Russian forces in Ukraine had so far met with no significant success. Kiev’s armed forces have suffered heavy casualties and “no chance” against the Russian military, he said.

He suggested that Ukraine would soon run out of its own military equipment, leaving it entirely dependent on western-supplied hardware and undermining its ability to fight in the long run.

Recalling his stated goals early in the war to “demilitarize” and “denazify” Ukraine, Putin said:

“As for demilitarization, Ukraine will soon stop using its own equipment altogether. There’s nothing left. Everything they fight against and use is brought in from the outside. Well, you can’t fight like that for long.”

Putin warns of F-16S

Independent military analysts say that in nearly 16 months of war Ukraine has outstripped Russia’s much larger army, forcing it into major retreats around the cities of Kiev, Kharkiv and Kherson.

Ukraine’s military chiefs said on Friday that advancing Ukrainian troops are meeting “desperate resistance” from Russian forces around the town of Bakhmut, which Russia captured last month after the longest battle of the war.

Ukraine claims to have recaptured seven villages and 38 square miles in the initial stages of its counteroffensive.

But Russia’s Defense Ministry said on Friday its forces had repelled numerous counterattack attempts by the Ukrainian army at various front locations over the past 24 hours, inflicting heavy casualties on Kiev’s armed forces.

Putin said Western-supplied equipment, such as German-made Leopard tanks, was regularly destroyed, and that if Kiev got hold of US-made F-16 fighter jets from its allies, those would also go up in flames.

“F-16s will burn too, no doubt about that. But if they are deployed outside of Ukraine and used in combat operations, we need to think about how and where to use these assets that are being used against us in combat operations.”

This is “a serious risk” of dragging NATO further into the conflict, he said.