I’m loving the Good Cop, Bad Cop bit here.
It’s fun.
RT:
Russian President Vladimir Putin did not support his Belarusian counterpart Alexander Lukashenko’s suggestion to offer “a mirror response” to NATO’s aircraft training flights.
On Saturday, during his meeting with Putin in Saint Petersburg, Lukashenko shared his concern over US and NATO aircraft “that are training to carry nuclear warheads and nuclear charges.” He asked his Russian colleague “to consider mirroring the answer to these things,” or at least to help Minsk to upgrade its planes.
Putin responded to the proposal by saying that while “there is no need” for reciprocity, Russia and Belarus have to take measures to ensure their own security, “as well as, probably, that of other members of the Collective Security Treaty Organization.”
In this context Putin suggested the modernization “a fairly large group” of Belarus’ SU-35 aircraft in Russia and to start training of flight personnel. He also pledged that “within the next few months” Russia will send to its ally Iskander-M tactical missile systems which can use both ballistic and cruise missiles “in both usual and nuclear versions.”
Both proposals were welcomed by Lukashenko.
During the meeting Putin also updated his counterpart on NATO capabilities. He claimed that “Americans have 200 nuclear tactical munitions in six European member countries of the North Atlantic bloc,” with 257 aircraft, “not only American ones,” prepared for their possible use.
So, Putin says “we don’t need to threaten people with nukes,” implying he will just send them if he has to send them. Oh yeah – and he’s gonna go ahead and send a few over to Lukashenko.
I don’t think that Lukashenko really is totally under the control of Putin. Obviously, he’s dependent on Putin. But he appears to be sort of doing his own thing. When Mike Pompeo unilaterally declared the Belarusian election was a fraud without any evidence (despite the fact that it was done in person with paper ballots and Lukashenko won more than 80% of the votes), then started shipping in Poles and women to do a color revolution, things got pretty rowdy.
There seemed to be disagreement between Lukashenko and Putin on how the situation should be handled, and then they appeared to come together.
Now, they’re clearly working well together, and I like this thing where Lukashenko goes out there and makes these hardline statements and Putin says “well, we don’t need to go that far – but here’s what we’ll do instead.” They played this when Lukashenko said the war was taking too long and the entire combined militaries of both countries should be sent in to crush the Ukraine.
Lukashenko is hardcore. I can’t find the interview, but it was with some Western outlet, and he said something like “we’re going to kill all of you people.” It was based.
Anyway – I guess the real story is that NATO is threatening Russia with nukes. Everyone is threatening to nuke everyone these days it seems.
CNN buried the lede.
It’s for the best. I have zero patience for people who claim that every city in the Western world doesn’t deserve to be nuked. It’s hilarious that we’re just all of a sudden closer to nuclear war than at any point in history.