Putin’s nuclear blackmail won’t work

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s statement on the possible deployment of nuclear weapons on the territory of Belarus will not fundamentally change the security situation in the Baltic states and constitutes a new attempt to blackmail the West from Moscow and its ally Minsk. Edgars Rinkevics, Latvian Foreign Minister, said so on Wednesday in an interview with Georgia’s media service.
Rinkevich, who today met with Assistant Secretary of State Wendy Sherman at the State Department, commented on a media question about the potential deployment of Russian nuclear weapons in Belarus, which borders Latvia.
According to the Latvian Foreign Minister, from the point of view of the security of his country, the possible deployment of nuclear weapons on Belarusian territory “will not change anything”, since Russian nuclear weapons have been deployed in the Kaliningrad region , near the border with the Baltic States, even before Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
“I don’t think it fundamentally changes military security. On the one hand, I think this is an act of desperation, because the war in Ukraine is not going well for Mr. Putin,” Rinkevich said, noting that Russian troops were unable to capture any major Ukrainian city for many months. . “This is…a continuation of the nuclear blackmail we saw last year. This (could be) an invitation to the negotiating table to discuss…wider strategic issues.
However, such statements, according to the minister, “clearly show that Belarus is not a sovereign country. In fact, it is part of the Russian Military District. As a solution to the problem, Rinkevich suggested “introducing even more sanctions against Russia and Belarus just to show that such blackmail will not work.”