Bombs away? Talk of nuclear bases may be a bluff, but is part of a longer gripe

Like a lot of what Vladimir Putin says about nuclear weapons, his suggestion that Russia was to store its bombs in Belarus may add up to less than it appears.

In February last year, Putin said he was putting Russia’s nuclear arsenal on high alert, but there was no perceptible change in the country’s nuclear posture, or any unusual movements of its weapons.

Putin and the leader of Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko, have been hinting at some kind of nuclear basing arrangement for some time. Over a year ago, Lukashenko staged a referendum to change the constitution to allow for that.

Putin is threatening to take a couple more steps on that road, starting the training of Belarus aircrews in April to pilot aircraft carrying nuclear bombs, and to finish storage facilities for tactical nuclear weapons by 1 July.

Nuclear experts are sceptical of these timelines, saying Russia has been working on a nuclear weapon storage facility in Kaliningrad for at least seven years and it is unclear whether the bombs have arrived there. No satellite imagery has surfaced suggesting something similar is being built in Belarus.

Hans Kristensen, the director of the nuclear information project at the Federation of American Scientists, said he had not seen anything indicating construction of a storage site. “But you can’t rule it out. You can bet a lot of people are combing over the country”

Putin had suggested a nuclear announcement was imminent, saying that Russia would respond to Britain’s decision to supply armour-piercing shells made of depleted uranium to Ukraine. Such shells require special handling and pose an environmental threat, but are by no means nuclear weapons.

Putin chose to focus on a longstanding gripe of Moscow’s about the US nuclear-sharing arrangements with five of its allies: Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Italy and Turkey. Under that arrangement, the US stores B61 gravity bombs (about 100) in those countries and their aircrews are trained to fly planes carrying them in the event of nuclear war.

Russia argues this is a violation of the 1968 nuclear non-proliferation treaty and, just last week, Putin’s joint statement with Xi Jinping said: “All nuclear-weapon states should refrain from deploying nuclear weapons abroad and withdraw nuclear weapons deployed abroad.”

Putin’s announcement about Belarus suggests he changed his mind about that principle in a matter of days. However, he can expect the global backlash to be muted due to widely shared impatience over many years with the US-Nato sharing arrangements.

But Kristensen argued that Putin had in large part himself to blame for the continued presence of B61s in Europe, through his seizure of Crimea and eastern Ukraine in 2014.

He said: “If Putin had not started what he’s doing there in 2014, it’s very likely that the nuclear weapons would have been withdrawn by now.”