Putin regularly threatens this to the point the US has placed sensors all around Ukraine. I’d guess that Chernobyl is abandon without a proper shutdown and the prevailing westerly winds makes a mess of things.
No longer relevent
Modnote: I hid the reply as you somehow missed both the staff note and the Modnote.
Please be more careful in the future.
He could have accomplished that just with Crimea, or keeping the pro-Russians riled up in Kherson. He didn’t have to start a war. Ukraine would not have been accepted into NATO while internal tensions were extant.
He may fall back to that plan if he can’t take Ukraine, bide his time until he believes he has a real, usable army.
To me, the whole war seams is a macabre delusion on Putin’s part. If it’s true he has serious medical problems then maybe he’s trying to leave his mark on history. That makes the situation that much more dangerous. It’s like watching a real-life 007 movie with some over-the-top villain trying to destroy the world. Only he could actually do it.
'Zactly.
So the smart goal is to prevent his success but not force his abject failure and just play for time to run out the clock on his lease on political power and / or life.
The problem is that will take concentrated effort and big doses of money from every NATO member for at least 5 and perhaps 20 years. That’s a long time in the famously short attention spans of democracies in general.
Some of whom have pretty big policy swings with every election. And where often the primary motivation of the new leadership is to simply undo whatever the old leadership was up to on general principles of “a pox on their house”.
Talk about your meaningless threats. What additional capacities would that give them? They’re intercontinental nuclear missiles; anything they could hit from Belarus they could already hit.
Are they really this desperate to find something to try to intimidate people with?
Lukashenko is desperate to impress upon Putin the depth of his fealty. That is the additional capacity making that move would give Lukashenko.
He may also be hedging his bets in the opposite direction. In a post-Putin world he’d rather have some now-surplus Russian nukes, much as Zelenskyy might have wished that Ukraine had held on to some of what The USSR has left behind when it evaporated.
An order of fear mongering to shore up his base, with a side of brown-nosing Putin.
Heh. I suggested that back in March, but few seemed to agree with me.
I get the impression that lots of the kinds of people who become successful dictators are good at figuring out arrangements where “heads I win, tails I win, and edges I still come out ok” is the guiding rule.
Since it was risking a disruption of the breaking news thread for Ukraine, I’ll pop this up here:
https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/28/europe/lukashenko-nuclear-weapons-belarus-russia-intl-hnk/index.html
During the interview, Lukashenko said, “no one minds Kazakhstan and other countries having the same close relations that we have with the Russian Federation.”
“It’s very simple,” he added. “Join the Union State of Belarus and Russia. That’s all: there will be nuclear weapons for everyone.”
Now, we’ve actually TALKED about this upthread, semi-jokingly, about offering a small number of nuclear weapons to our various non-nuclear allies, possibly including Ukraine. And I still think it’s a bad idea. But if Russia/Putin does move ahead on nuclear proliferation, the principles of MAD do lend itself to a similar situation where I could see the US gifting a small number of tactical weapons (almost certainly with a degree of technical security for arming of such) to it’s allies.
I wouldn’t be surprised in the least if the Ukraine hadn’t already asked for an equivalent ‘gift’ from NATO, and… well, yeah, I need a drink now. Granted, I don’t trust Lukashenko’s confirmation that he’s received the weapons, but if India and China don’t condemn this in the strongest manner in concrete terms, then I figure proliferation will be the de facto effect.
Join the dark side, we have nukes?
We can’t offer you a decent life expectancy, or any degree of freedom – but hey, we can offer you some nukes!
(Possibly with no real control over them.)
It is perhaps not coincidental that Lukashenko is “ill” in Moscow right now. Maybe his claims of free nukes for the 'Stans if they return to the post-Soviet fold was a bridge too far vs. his actual sponsor’s (= Moscow’s) position.
Being a second-tier dictator is a bit like being a drug mule. Short-term highly profitable, but the retirement plan sucks.
I worry that if Lukashenko dies Russia might try to annex Belarus or install a more loyal puppet. Putin can then attack Ukraine from the north and utilise Belarusian troops (though that would be risky)
Why would that be risky?
Because I imagine some of the troops would be unhappy with that situation. And that can lead to military complications.
Russia is already attacking Ukraine from the north. Or at least, trying to. Belarus isn’t doing anything to stop the passage of Russian troops.
And they were rewarded with nukes.