In full pulse for NATO and Ukraine to abide by his demands, Vladimir Putin witnessed this Saturday from the Kremlin operations center how his strategic deterrence forces tested his extensive arsenal of nuclear-capable missiles. The Supreme Commander-in-Chief of the Russian Armed Forces watched the exercises accompanied by Belarusian President Alexandr Lukashenko, his main ally in this crisis. Despite promising on numerous occasions that Russian troops would leave its territory on February 20, once the joint maneuvers of both countries concluded, Minsk opened the door for them to continue to be deployed along the border with Ukraine, where the winds of war are blowing after the staging of an evacuation in the Ukrainian region of Donbas that has raised many suspicions.
“No one said that Russian troops will return to the Russian Federation tomorrow or the day after tomorrow. Tomorrow the Allied Resolve exercises end. When and for how long, that will be decided by the commanders in chief,” said the Secretary of State of the Belarusian Security Council, Alexandr Vólfovich.
Russia has sent to Belarus some 30,000 soldiers plus all kinds of heavy weapons, although its forces total some 129,000 troops along the entire border with Ukraine, according to data presented the day before by the Ukrainian Defense Minister, Olekssi Reznikov. . Minsk itself acknowledged that part of the soldiers assigned to the exercises in the neighboring country did not participate in the training, but were sent to reinforce its southern flank.
In addition to the maneuvers of regular troops, Russia’s strategic deterrence forces were put to the test this Saturday, and they did so in all possible scenarios, by land, sea and air. Lukashenko witnessed exercises that could take place in his country in the near future if he agrees to it. The Belarusian regime has orchestrated a referendum on the constitutional reform on February 24 that will not only shield the power of the president, but also plans to allow for the first time the deployment of nuclear weapons and permanent Russian units on its territory.
On December 21, the Kremlin spokesman, Dmitri Peskov, admitted that the option of placing nuclear weapons in his ally is on the table. In addition, the Russian government threatened this week in its response to Washington to adopt “technical-military measures” if the negotiations on the dismantling of NATO and the security guarantees it demands fail.
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Sitting in the room next to Lukashenko, Putin watched as his forces fired all kinds of rockets from one end of the country to the other. According to the Kremlin statement, the Russian air forces not only “successfully tested” the launch of hypersonic Kinzhal missiles, capable of exceeding 10 times the speed of sound and hitting targets 2,000 kilometers away, but also their Tu-95s strategic bombers they also used other types of air-launched missiles.
In turn, the Black Sea and North Sea fleets attacked land and sea targets with Kalibr and hypersonic Zircon (also known as Tsirkon) cruise missiles, and the accuracy of intercontinental missiles was put to the test. One was fired from Plesetsk, 800 kilometers north of Moscow, and traveled across the country until it reached a range on the Kamchatka peninsula in the Far East; while a nuclear submarine fired a liquid fuel rocket from the Barents Sea, north of the Nordic countries, to the other end of the country. According to the Kremlin, all tests achieved their goals.
“Invulnerable” missiles
Many of these weapons were announced by Putin before the National Assembly on March 1, 2018. The Russian president then assured that the missiles were “invulnerable” as they were capable of overcoming the US anti-missile shield. In his State of the Nation address, the Russian leader claimed that his country had gained the upper hand in the arms race and was thus responding to Washington’s 2002 abandonment of the ABM ballistic missile treaty.
However, the military advantage has been short-lived. Defending his demands against NATO, Putin told his military leadership on December 21 that the White House will soon have weapons equivalent to his own, and this would endanger his sphere of influence over Ukraine. “The United States does not yet have hypersonic weapons, but we know when it could develop them. There is no way to hide it, everything is recorded,” the Russian president said, warning that Washington, “under this cover, could arm the extremists of the neighboring country and push them against Russia, against some Russian regions in particular… we will say Crimea ”.
However, there are also certain affinities between the two parties despite the fact that Russia insists that its proposals are a single package and not an à la carte menu. One of the common points in the negotiations between the Kremlin and the White House is the supervision of their rockets after the US abandonment of the medium and short-range missile treaty in 2019. “It is one of the priority areas. This category of weapons is a basic component of the new security equation that Russia and the United States should develop jointly”, stated the response delivered by the Russian Foreign Ministry on February 17.
The North American country abandoned that treaty due to the Russian development of the 9M729 cruise missile, which in theory would reach the prohibited radius of between 500 and 5,500 kilometers away. “Those of transparency could include checking that this missile is not present in Russian facilities,” Moscow offered to Washington, which had previously proposed a monitoring system that would also dispel Russian doubts about its Aegis platforms deployed in Romania and Poland.
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