Editor’s Note: Keir Giles (@KeirGiles) works with the Russia and Eurasia Programme of Chatham House, an international affairs think tank in the UK. He is the author of “Russia’s War on Everybody: And What it Means for You.” The views expressed in this commentary are his own. Read more opinion on CNN.
CNN
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Vladimir Putin last week gave details of Russia’s stated intent to base tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus. The flurry of alarmist reporting on what this meant highlights much of what is wrong with Western responses to Russian nuclear intimidation.
How Putin’s words have been spun in the West may be a surprise to Moscow — but there’s no doubt it will be a highly gratifying one. Because Russia has already “used” nuclear weapons. It’s used them highly successfully without firing them, by trading on empty threats about potential nuclear strikes to very effectively deter the West from fully supporting Ukraine against Russia’s imperialist war.
By now though, we should have learned not to confuse what Putin has said with what Russia has done or is about to do.
Putin didn’t announce any plans that had not already been declared in the middle of 2022. Last week’s stated intention wasn’t new — it just had dates attached to it that we had not heard before.
Similarly, it’s been widely reported that Putin took this step in direct response to the UK’s announcement that it would be providing Ukraine with tank shells containing depleted uranium. While Putin previously said Russia would “respond accordingly” to such a move, that wasn’t the stated trigger in Saturday’s rehashed plans.
In the full version of his interview released by Russian TV, Putin explicitly said that this was a long-standing plan “outside the context of” the UK’s announcement.
There’s no doubt that Russia will be keen to extract maximum intimidatory potential from any plans to move long-range missile systems forward, so they can threaten larger areas of Europe.
There’s a precedent in Russia’s long-running program for deploying Iskander missiles to Kaliningrad (a Russian province along the Baltic coast) — which caused fresh alarm among Western politicians throughout the previous decade every time it was…
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